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WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 




DANTE 



WITNESSES OF 
THE LIGHT 

BEING THE 

William 2£>ei&en li^oWe %tttutt$ 

FOR 1903 

BY 

WASHINGTON GLADDEN 

WITH PORTRAITS 









BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

(Cbc Ifttoeitfibe pretf, Cambridge 

1903 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies R«caive£ 

SEP 16 1903 

Copyright Entry 
*SS GL. XXc No 

copy a. 






COPYRIGHT I903 BY WASHINGTON GLADDEN 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 



Published September IQ03 



CONTENTS 

CHAP. PAGE 

I. Dante, the Poet 1 ^ 

II. Michelangelo, the Artist ... 51 ^ 

III. Fichte, the Philosopher .... 99K 

IV. Victor Hugo, the Man of Letters . 143 k 
V. Richard Wagner, the Musician . . . 191 k 

VI. Ruskin, the Preacher .... 237 1/ 



THE WILLIAM BELDEN NOBLE LECTURES 

This Lectureship was constituted a perpetual foundation 
in Harvard University in 1898, as a memorial to the late 
William Belden Noble of Washington, D. C. (Harvard, 
1885). The deed of gift provides that the lectures shall be 
not less than six in number, that they shall be delivered 
annually, and, if convenient, in the Phillips Brooks House, 
during the season of Advent. Each lecturer shall have 
ample notice of his appointment, and the publication of each 
course of lectures is required. The purpose of the Lecture- 
ship will be further seen in the following citation from the 
deed of gift by which it was established : — 

" The object of the founder of the Lectures is to continue 
the mission of William Belden Noble, whose supreme desire 
it was to extend the influence of Jesus as the way, the truth, 
and the life ; to make known the meaning of the words of 
Jesus, ' I am come that they might have life, and that they 
might have it more abundantly.' In accordance with the 
large interpretation of the Influence of Jesus by the late 
Phillips Brooks, with whose religious teaching he in whose 
memory the Lectures are established and also the founder 
of the Lectures were in deep sympathy, it is intended that 
the scope of the Lectures shall be as wide as the highest in- 
terests of humanity. With this end in view, — the perfection 
of the spiritual man and the consecration by the spirit of 
Jesus of every department of human character, thought, and 
activity, — the Lectures may include philosophy, literature, 
art, poetry, the natural sciences, political economy, sociology, 
ethics, history both civil and ecclesiastical, as well as theology 
and the more direct interests of the religious life. Beyond 
a sympathy with the purpose of the Lectures, as thus defined, 
no restriction is placed upon the lecturer." 



I 

DANTE, THE POET 



The " Divina Commedia " is of Dante's writing, yet in truth 
it belongs to the Christian centuries ; only the finishing of it is 
Dante's. So always. The craftsman there, the smith with that 
metal of his, with his tools, with these cunning methods — how 
little of all he does is properly his work ! All past inventive men 
work there with him ; — as, indeed, with all of us, in all things. 
Dante is the spokesman of the Middle Ages ; the Thought they 
lived by stands here in everlasting music. — Carlyle. 

Dante is the greatest prophet of the Christian centuries, be- 
cause he has given utterance to the largest aggregation of truth, 
in terms of universal experience, and in a form permanent 
through its exceeding beauty. — Charles Allen Dinsmore. 

Ah, from what agonies of heart and brain, 

What exultations trampling on despair, 

What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong, 
What passionate outcry of a soul in pain, 

Uprose this poem of the earth and air, 

This mediaeval miracle of song ! 

Longfellow. 



WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 



DANTE, THE POET 

" It is intended/' says the Founder of this 
Lectureship in her deed of gift, " that the 
scope of the Lectures shall be as wide as the 
highest interests of humanity. With this end 
in view — the perfection of the spiritual man 
and the consecration by the spirit of Jesus 
of every department of human character, 
thought, and activity — the Lectures may 
include philosophy, literature, arts, poetry, 
the natural sciences, political economy, socio- 
logy, ethics, history, both civil and ecclesiasti- 
cal, as well as theology and the more direct 
interests of the religious life." Under such 
a charter one's liberties are large, and I shall 
be quite within the precept if I devote the 
hours which we shall spend together to the 
study of the lives of a few men who have 



4 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

stood forth, in generations widely separated, 
as representatives of the truth that was in 
Jesus, as witnesses of the light that lighteth 
every man coming into the world. Not one 
of these men was professionally or distinc- 
tively a religious teacher ; some of them would 
have found it difficult to pronounce any of 
the formularies by which the various ecclesi- 
asticisms test their adherents ; but not one of 
them could have been the man we have known 
or could have uttered the message that was 
given to him but for the presence in his life 
of that Spirit whose incarnation Jesus was. 
It is because the work of these men was done 
quite outside the realm of organized Christian- 
ity that I have selected them ; their lives illus- 
trate the truth that the kingdom of heaven is 
larger than the visible church. 

I have called them witnesses of the hVht. 
This may seem a superfluous function ; is not 
the light its own best witness ? It would be, 
doubtless, if there were not so many caverns 
and cellars in which men can hide themselves 
from it ; if there were not so many who walk 
abroad wrapped in the darkness of tradition 
or superstition or fear. So it happens that 
it is a great part of the business of God's 



DANTE, THE POET b 

messengers in this world to point to the light. 
Of the Forerunner it was said, " The same 
came for witness, that he might bear witness 
of the light, that all might believe through 
him. He was not the light, but came that he 
might bear witness of the light." And Jesus 
said of himself, in the one testimony which 
most clearly defines his mission : " For this 
cause was I born, and for this came I into the 
world, that I should bear witness to the truth." 
No new truth needs to be created or invented ; 
there is enough and to spare, and that which 
it is most needful for us to know lies upon 
the threshold of our lives ; we do not have to 
climb to heaven after it or to descend into the 
depths to unearth it ; it is near us, — so near, 
oftentimes, that we do not see it ; and the 
mission of prophet and seer and teacher is to 
bring home to us realities of the homeliest 
sort, whose meaning we too often miss ; to 
open our eyes to the environing beauty which 
appeals to us in vain, and to speak the word 
which shall arouse in us the slumbering sense 
of things unseen and eternal. 

The witnesses whom we are about to call 
in these studies uttered their testimony in 
four different languages, and brought to the 



b WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

world messages greatly varying in form ; but 
we shall find the unity of the spirit under- 
lying all this variety of expression, and shall 
have reason, I trust, to rejoice in the light 
into which they have guided our feet. 

Let me say, also, that these lectures are 
not for scholars. I am not an expert in lit- 
erary criticism ; I can offer no help to the 
well-instructed student of any of the litera- 
tures into which we shall look; all that I 
hope to do is to gather up and set in order 
some of the more obvious facts respecting the 
life and work of these great men, that un- 
learned people, like myself, may get a little 
better idea of the place they filled and the 
work they did. 

* 

Of Dante the poet we are now to speak. 
It would be difficult for the best instructed 
teacher to present, within the limits of one 
short discourse, any adequate account of this 
man or of his works. The books which have 
been written about Dante now run up into 
the thousands; three large octavo volumes 
are filled with titles and descriptions of the 
Dantesque literature. You could not read, in 
two or three lifetimes, all that has been writ- 



DANTE, THE POET 7 

ten to illustrate the character and expound 
the teaching of this one man. 

It is a little curious to note the rise and 
fall of the current of popular interest in 
Dante. After his death a chair was founded 
in his native city for the exposition of his 
great poem in the Duomo ; and on the walls 
of that sanctuary his picture was painted by 
Michelmo ; they still show it to you near the 
great portal, though age has blurred its out- 
lines and faded its colors. Boccaccio, who 
was eight years old when Dante died, was 
the first occupant of that chair, and his lec- 
tures were given fifty-two years after Dante's 
death. Other Italian cities followed the ex- 
ample of Florence ; at Bologna, Pisa, Pia- 
cenza, and Venice popular instruction was 
given respecting his great epic ; and at Milan 
an institution was founded by Archbishop 
Visconte, to expound its mysteries. Not only 
in Italy was Dante renowned. English bish- 
ops wished to read the Comedy, and, moved 
by their request, an Italian bishop rendered 
it into Latin. The sixteenth century saw 
twenty-one editions of this poem ; the seven- 
teenth forty-two ; the eighteenth four ; of the 
nineteenth I have not the full tale. A his- 



8 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

torian who counted the translations in 1843 
reported nineteen Latin, twenty-four French, 
twenty English, twenty German, two Spanish. 
Since then the list of English translations has 
been considerably extended. Three of the 
best of these have been made in America, 
that of Thomas W. Parsons, that of Longfel- 
low, and the exquisite prose version of Pro- 
fessor Charles Eliot Norton. 

The fact that the eighteenth century pro- 
duced only four versions of the great poem 
against forty-two in the seventeenth and a 
greater number in the nineteenth illustrates 
the intellectual activity of the eighteenth cen- 
tury. It was a mocking age, whose prophet 
was Voltaire, and this is Voltaire's flippant 
judgment : " The Italians call him divine, 
but it is a hidden divinity ; few people un- 
derstand his oracles. He has commentators, 
which, perhaps, is another reason for his not 
being understood. His reputation will go on 
increasing because scarce anybody reads him." 
This does not throw much light on Dante, but 
it helps us to estimate Voltaire. 

It is evident, then, that we have before us 
to-night one of the great characters of Chris- 
tian history ; one whose genius has exacted 



DANTE, THE POET 9 

from the thinkers and the readers of six cen- 
turies a larger tribute of attention than has 
been given perhaps to any other poet who has 
lived within that period. No one who cares 
to know what influences have shaped modern 
thought can afford to be wholly ignorant of 
Dante. 

His life began in Florence, in the month 
of May, in the year 1265. The beautiful 
Tuscan capital on the banks of the Arno 
was then a mediaeval town much smaller than 
to-day, and with few of the treasures of art 
which it now possesses. The commercial 
spirit was well developed, and the long and 
bitter strife between the feudal and the com- 
mercial classes was already raging. 

These Italian communes or republics of the 
Middle Ages present a most interesting study. 
The industrial and trading classes had gath- 
ered in the cities and had developed a rude 
sort of democracy, — not a radical sort of de- 
mocracy, to be sure, — much the same sort 
that our New England fathers set up when 
they graded the seats in their meeting-houses 
according to " rank, state, and dignity," as- 
signing the best pews in the synagogue to 
those of most social distinction, and putting 



10 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

their plebeians in the back seats. Thus these 
Italian communes usually had a consulate of 
their most distinguished men, who adminis- 
tered municipal affairs, supported by a grand 
council of one hundred or so of their illustri- 
ous citizens. Below these was a parlemento, 
or town-meeting, to which all adult citizens 
belonged. But the business was done mainly 
by the consuls and the grand council ; the 
popular assembly did not exercise much power. 

In castles, round about these cities, had 
dwelt the nobles, holding their lands for the 
most part as fiefs under the Holy Roman 
Emperor, who was always a German. Their 
presence was to these sturdy burghers an 
obstruction and a menace. The land which 
they occupied was needed for the sustenance 
of those who dwelt within the walls, and the 
nobles nearest the cities were gradually forced 
by the townsmen to abandon portions of their 
estates, and to dwell for at least a part of the 
year within the walls. Here they became a 
disturbing element ; industry of all sorts was 
beneath them, and Satan found plenty of mis- 
chief for their idle hands ; feuds were fierce 
and perennial. 

The internal condition of these Italian cit- 



DANTE, THE POET 11 

ies was most lamentable. Security there was 
none for life or property. The commune had 
failed ; democracy was unequal to the task of 
preserving order — in communities ignorant 
and brutal as these it always is ; the dictator 
must be called in. Some noble, generally from 
another city, was chosen chief justiciary, and 
these despots, who confirmed their power by 
courting the populace, were often bloodthirsty 
tyrants. In Mr. Symonds's words, " They 
had all the selfishness of an aristocracy, none 
of its nobleness. They combined the suspi- 
cious, intriguing spirit of party leaders with 
the ferocity of brigands and the inhumanity 
of autocrats. Each despot was jealous of his 
neighbor, cruel to his kin. Domestic trage- 
dies, poisonings, imprisonments, treacheries, 
frauds of guardians, oppressions of the weaker 
by the stronger member of a ruling house, 
were encouraged by the facility of revolution 
which the peculiar constitution of semi-repub- 
lican, semi-despotic governments afforded, in 
the midst of hungry competitions and rival 
states." ! 

Not only did the cities thus organize for 
themselves a lively Pandemonium within their 

1 An Introduction to the Study of Dante, p. 29. 



12 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

own walls, but their relation to one another 
heightened this disorder. There was no union 
among them ; no recognized bond of a com- 
mon nationality ; the hand of every city was 
against every other. Wars were incessant. 
For territory, for commercial primacy and 
privilege, for all the prizes of independent 
statehood they were always fighting. 

Through the tumult of these streets and 
the strife of jealous municipalities another 
distracting note is constantly sounding — the 
battle-cry of the Empire against the Papacy. 
Each asserted a supremacy which the other 
denied, and the struggle between them is the 
tragedy of the Middle Ages. Into this con- 
flict the Italian cities — with quarrels enough 
of their own, one would think — were con- 
stantly drawn. The nobles, as feudatories 
of the Emperor, were generally his partisans ; 
the free cities, for the most part, w r ere the al- 
lies of the Pope. The Papacy, in those early 
days, appeared to be the champion of demo- 
cracy ; and those who sought to reform the 
abuses of the church were disposed to take 
the side of the Emperor, so that it might be 
stated as a general rule that religious liberals 
were good imperialists and political liberals 



DANTE, THE POET 13 

were good papists. There was a tendency, 
however, for every community to divide on 
this question of Pope and Emperor ; and by 
this strife cities were torn asunder — each 
party on coming to power was likely to ban- 
ish the chiefs of the opposite party, to tear 
down their palaces and confiscate their es- 
tates. 

Such was the state of sunny Italy when 
Dante Alighieri was born. His family was 
one of aristocratic lineage ; there may have 
been a Teutonic strain in the blood ; castles 
were theirs without the walls, and towered 
houses within. " On Arno's beauteous river, 
in the great city, I was born and grew," is 
the poet's own report. When he was nine or 
ten years old his father died ; his education 
went on under the tutorship of Brunello La- 
tini, a great scholar of that day, with whom he 
studied rhetoric, poetry, and mathematics, — 
gaining also a good knowledge of several of 
the Latin classics, Vergil, Lucan, Ovid, and 
Statius. Music and painting were also among 
his accomplishments. Without doubt he was a 
studious and serious lad, beyond his years in 
many ways, capable of great experiences ; for 
it was before his father's death, when he was 



14 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

only nine years old, that something happened 
to this boy that the world has remembered for 
six centuries and will never forget. His fa- 
ther took him to a May party at the house of 
one of his rich neighbors, Folco Portinari, 
and there for the first time he saw Beatrice 
Portinari, the daughter of the house, a little 
girl of eight. See how vivid is his memory 
of that meeting as he recalls it many years 
after : — 

" Her dress on that day was of a most no- 
ble color, a subdued and goodly crimson, gir- 
dled and adorned in such sort as best suited 
with her very tender age. At that moment 
I say most truly that the spirit of life which 
hath its dwelling in the secretest chambers of 
the heart began to beat so violently, that the 
least pulses of my body shook therewith ; and 
in trembling it said these words : JEcce deus 
fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi." 1 

Singular words were these for a child of 
nine to speak concerning another child of 
eight, but the most singular thing about them 
is their perfect truth ; the whole life of one 
of the most strenuous and veracious souls that 
ever lived is their verification. The impres- 

1 Symonds's Introduction to the Study of Dante, p. 38. 



DANTE, THE POET 15 

sion made upon this childish mind never faded ; 
it became the motive of his life. The chil- 
dren do not seem to have had any compan- 
ionship ; Dante often watched for a sight of 
Beatrice and treasured in his memory every 
glimpse of her, but it was not until nine years 
after their first meeting — on the street ap- 
parently, and in company with two other 
ladies — that he met her again, and she gra- 
ciously spoke to him. She was dressed on 
this occasion in purest white, he said, and 
turning toward the place where he stood she 
saluted him so kindly that he seemed to him- 
self " to behold the utmost limits of beati- 
tude." This appears to have been the only 
direct communication he ever had from her. 
It does not appear that she was ever aware of 
the feeling she had inspired in him. The 
relations of young people of their class were 
closely guarded, and their consent was not 
often sought in matrimonial alliances. At the 
age of twenty Beatrice was married to Simon 
de Bardi ; it is not known that Dante ever 
saw her again ; four years later she died. 

That was a dark day for Dante ; it seemed 
to him that the light of life had gone out. 
He wrote a letter about it, he tells us, to the 



16 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

city fathers, beginning with the first words of 
Jeremiah's Lamentations, — " How doth the 
city sit solitary I" It was a strange thing to 
do : as if the passing of this young woman 
of twenty-four could be a matter of public 
interest. It only shows the intensity of 
Dante's nature ; to him the life of the whole 
city had come to a pause. After a year of 
desolation " it was given to me," he says, " to 
behold a very wonderful vision, wherein I 
saw things which determined me to say no 
more of this most blessed one until such time 
as I could discourse more worthily concern- 
ing her. And to this end I labor all I can, 
as she well knoweth. Wherefore if it be 
His pleasure through whom is the life of all 
things that my life continue with me a few 
years, it is my hope that I shall write con- 
cerning her what hath not before been writ- 
ten of any woman. After the which may it 
seem good unto Him who is the Master of 
grace that my spirit should go hence to be- 
hold the glory of its lady — to wit, of that 
blessed Beatrice who now joyeth continually 
on his countenance, qui est per omnia secu- 
larum benedictus, Laus Deo ! " ' 

1 Symonds's Introduction to the Study of Dante, p. 48. 



DANTE, THE POET 17 

The five years following the death of Bea- 
trice were busy years. Dante did not sit 
glooming over his bereavement ; he flung 
himself into the affairs of state ; he fought 
in some of the wars of Florence, and in the 
pauses of the strife he gave himself with ar- 
dor to study. At about the age of thirty, 
by the persuasion of friends, we are told, he 
married Gemma Donati, a lady of rank in 
Florence, with whom he lived for a few years, 
and who bore him five children. That the 
marriage was an unhappy one has been as- 
serted, but little is known about it ; no word 
of Dante's throws any light on this relation. 
That it was a marriage of convenience rather 
than affection is not doubtful ; if we absolve 
Dante for his share in it, it must be on the 
ground of possible circumstances which we do 
not understand. 

When Dante was twenty-eight years old, 
the democracy of Florence, in one of its radi- 
cal turns, decreed that no one should take 
part in the government of the city who did 
not belong to some industrial or commer- 
cial guild ; Dante, though an aristocrat by 
birth, accordingly enrolled himself in the Guild 
of Physicians and Apothecaries, — the same 



18 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

Guild from which the most famous family of 
Florence, the Medici, took their name. By 
this guild he was chosen one of the priores, or 
chief men, of the city ; he seems to have been 
sent abroad on one or two embassies, and to 
have had a considerable part in the govern- 
ment of the city. Just then one of the worst 
of the family feuds was raging in Florence, 
the feud of the Neri and the Bianchi, — and 
the streets were full of brawls. Dante advised 
the banishment of the leaders of both par- 
ties, and the thing was done, although kin- 
dred and intimate companions of his were 
among the exiles. Business of state soon 
after called Dante to Rome, and, in his ab- 
sence, the party adverse to him gaining power, 
he was deposed and a sentence of exile was 
pronounced against him and others, with a 
heavy fine to be paid within two months. 
Refusing to heed this demand, a second sen- 
tence was hurled after him, condemning him 
to be burned alive if ever he set foot within 
the jurisdiction of Florence. This rank injus- 
tice kindled in the soul of Dante a fire that 
never cooled ; he knew that he had deserved 
well at the hands of the city, and that it was 
the madness of partisanship that had doomed 



DANTE, THE POET 19 

him to exile ; by every means open to him he 
sought to secure the overthrow of the powers 
inimical to him, that he might return to his 
home, but all in vain. Years later the offer 
was made to the exiles that they might return, 
provided they would pay a heavy fine, submit 
to a brief imprisonment, and walk through the 
streets arrayed in penitential robes. Dante's 
answer to this insulting proposition still blazes 
with righteous indignation : — 

" Is this, then, the glorious return of Dante 
Alighieri to his country after nearly three 
lustres of suffering and exile ? Did an inno- 
cence patent to all merit this — this the per- 
petual sweat and toil of study ? Far from 
a man, the housemate of philosophy, be so 
meek and earthen-hearted a humility as to 
allow himself to be offered up bound, like a 
schoolboy or a criminal ! Far from a man, 
the preacher of justice, to pay those who have 
done him wronsr as for a favor ! This is not 
the way of returning to my country ; but if 
another can be found that does not derogate 
from the fame and honor of Dante, that will 
I enter on with no flagging steps. For if by 
none such Florence may be entered, then by 
me never. Can I not everywhere behold 



20 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

the mirror of the sun and stars, speculate on 
sweetest truths under any sky, without giv- 
ing myself up inglorious, nay, ignominious, to 
the populace and the city of Florence ? Nor 
shall I want for bread." 1 

Never again did Dante behold his ancestral 
home. He became the acknowledged poet 
of Italy, but his own city spurned him. He 
lived in hope that one faction or another would 
call him back, and he declined to receive the 
poet's crown anywhere else than at the font 
where he had received baptism, but that re- 
compense was denied him. His was the life 
of a wanderer. He visited many of the uni- 
versities in Italy and France ; there is even a 
tradition, not very firm, that he made his way 
to Oxford; all the learning of his time he 
devoured. One nobleman after another took 
him in and gave him temporary shelter ; some 
of them seem to have been not only kind to 
him but proud of his friendship, yet it was a 
bitter thing to him to live the life of a depend- 
ent. Abundant proof had he 

" how savoreth of salt 
The bread of others, and how hard a road 
The going down and up another's stairs." 2 

1 Quoted in Lowell's Literary Essays, iv. 135. 



DANTE, THE POET 21 

He died at length in Kavenna, September 
14, 1321, in the fifty-sixth year of his age, and 
his friend, Guido Novello, buried him. In 
the poet's garb they robed him for the sepul- 
chre, and the wreath of palm that he had never 
worn in life was laid upon his pallid brow. 

Twenty-nine years later Florence voted ten 
golden florins to Dante's daughter Beatrice, 
then a nun in Eavenna ; the messenger who 
bore the donation was the poet Boccaccio. 
Half a century later Florence was ready to 
build a tomb to the dead prophet, " and 
begged in vain," says Lowell, " for the meta- 
phorical ashes of the man of whom she had 
threatened to make literal cinders if she could 
catch him alive." In 1429 she renewed her 
prayer, and again, in 1519, Michelangelo 
stood ready to erect a worthy monument, but 
the Pope forbade the removal of the sacred 
dust. It was not until the first part of the 
nineteenth century, more than five hundred 
years after Dante's death, that a memorial of 
him, " ugly," says Lowell, " beyond even the 
usual lot of such," was placed in the church 
of Santa Croce ; its unsightliness makes it a 
suitable offering from Florence to the greatest 
name in all her annals. 



22 WITNESSES TO THE LIGHT 

To the work of this, the first and greatest 
o£ the "Makers of Florence/' we can give 
but a glance. It seems little less than quix- 
otic to undertake to say anything about it 
within such limitations ; yet one remembers 
glimpses, — like that which breaks upon the 
eye when the summit of the Jura over Neu- 
chatel is reached, and the Alps, at sunset, 
spring into the horizon, — a few swift min- 
utes, whose glory can never fade. And if one 
could grasp but the outline of this work of 
Dante's, something of price would be added 
to his store. 

There is a Latin treatise, " De Vulgari 
Eloquio," in which he argues for the produc- 
tion of literature in the common speech of the 
people. Up to Dante's time all European lit- 
erature, with insignificant exceptions, was in 
Latin. There was one advantage in this, that 
scholars of all lands had access to the whole 
of literature. You could not say with Mr. 
Boffin that all print was open to them, for 
print was not yet ; but all letters were cosmo- 
politan. They were only for scholars, how- 
ever, and Dante, like Wycliffe after him, 
wanted them brought within reach of the 
common people. He argued about it in 



DANTE, THE POET 23 

Latin, as he needs must, for those to whom 
he addressed his argument would not have 
read a treatise on any learned subject in any 
other tongue. But he did something better 
than argue about it : he did it. His own 
great poems were written in Italian, and by 
that single act the common speech of the 
Italian people was lifted up and glorified for- 
ever. No man, perhaps, ever did for any 
other language what Dante did for the Ital- 
ian. " Before the time of Shakespeare," says 
Mrs. Oliphant, " the well of English un defiled 
had already been opened ; but Dante formed 
into written speech the tongue in which, 
against all precedent, he chose to tell his great 
and solemn tale. . . . And, indirectly, by 
forming and giving dignity to one European 
language, he emancipated all. The father 
of modern literature has thus an inalienable 
right to take the lead in the great line of 
writers who have made the countries of Chris- 
tendom known to each other, and who fur- 
nish at once the clearest and the surest reve- 
lation of the races in whose hands, for the last 
five hundred years, has lain all the progress 
of the world." 

In view of this single service, who will 



24 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

venture to estimate the debt that the world 
owes to Dante Alighieri ? We speak of lib- 
erators, but who is like unto the man that 
struck from learning her scholastic fetters, 
and set her free to walk among the common 
people and speak with them, each in his own 
tongue in which he was born. There is a re- 
miniscence in it of the miracle of Pentecost. 
Another of Dante's prose works is "De 
Monarchia," a learned essay in which he 
seeks to show that monarchy, and a universal 
monarchy at that, is essential to the world's 
peace ; that wars will never cease till all peo- 
ples are brought under one sway ; that this 
right to rule the world belongs to the head 
of the Holy Roman Empire ; that he derived 
his authority directly from God and not, pace 
Hildebrand, from God through the Pope. 
Still he thinks that Pope and Emperor ought 
to dwell in peace together, the one the tem- 
poral, the other the spiritual, ruler of the 
earth ; that they are coordinate authorities. 
The church must not meddle in the affairs of 
state nor the state in the affairs of the church. 
Two things he clearly saw; first, that the 
state is just as sacred as the church ; second, 
that when the church becomes a centralized 



DANTE, THE POET 25 

ecclesiasticism there must be a clean separation 
of its sphere from that of the state. Great 
truths were these, which no man of his time 
had seen with equal clearness. 

Of the lyrics and the letters of Dante, I 
must not stay to speak. There remains the 
great trilogy, which has made his name death- 
less : the " Vita Nuova," the " Convito, ,, the 
" Divina Commedia," — these three, of which 
the greatest is the last, but all of which are 
vitally related. 

The three books are joined together by the 
poet's love for Beatrice Portinari, a love so 
ethereal, so spiritual, that it idealizes and 
transfigures its object, and becomes to the 
soul that cherishes it as a glass through which 
the wonder and the glory of the whole spirit- 
ual world are revealed. I have shown you how 
slight was the contact of the life of Dante 
with that of Beatrice ; she had never been to 
him more than a vision or a dream, but that 
vision he invested with all divine perfection 
and worshiped it. It was not merely woman- 
hood that he revered in her, it was glorified 
womanhood, apotheosized womanhood, — the 
highest conception that a man can entertain 
of purity and truth and loveliness. 



26 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

The " Vita Nuova " is the simple story of 
Dante's youthful love, told in sonnets and 
canzoni, with naive little prose commentaries 
on each. It was written not long- after her 
death, and before his marriage, while he was 
still a resident of Florence. Little incidents 
are recalled of days when he saw her ; slight 
events that reminded him of her, or of what 
others said about her are narrated — all with 
frank simplicity and worshipful tenderness. 
It is as pure as the song of an angel, not a 
shade of earthly passion clouds it. I have 
given you the last words of it, in which he 
promises, if God will let him live a few more 
years, to " write concerning her what hath 
not before been written of any woman." But 
that he had done already in the " Vita Nu- 
ova ; " no woman on earth or in heaven was 
ever glorified with such reverent love. 

The " Convito " or Banquet, has been the 
subject of much controversy. The structure 
is something like that of the " Vita Nuova ; " 
it consists of odes, with prose commentaries 
upon them ; but the disquisitions and digres- 
sions of this book are far more pedantic and 
artificial than that of the earlier book. 

It appears to be a kind of Apologia pro 



DANTE, THE POET 27 

Vita Sua, a labored attempt to explain some 
episodes in his own mental history, the remem- 
brance of which disquiets him. Some of his 
songs have intimated a lack of loyalty to the 
memory of Beatrice ; he seems to be trying 
to prove that the language which some might 
so interpret was not so intended ; the gentle 
lady whom these poems praise was no flesh 
and blood Dulcinea ; it was Philosophy. Of 
her he admits he has become a devotee ; she 
has brought him consolation in his loneliness. 
" I pictured her after the fashion of a gentle 
lady, and I could not picture her in any atti- 
tude save of compassion. And, moved by 
this image, I began to go where she was her- 
self to be seen in verity, to wit, to the schools 
of the religious orders, and to the disputa- 
tions of such as do philosophize ; so that in 
a short season — perhaps of thirty months — 
I began to feel so much of her sweetness that 
the love of her banished and destroyed all 
other thought. This lady was the daughter 
of God, the queen of all, most noble and fair 
Philosophy." l 

When we try to follow Dante in this Apo- 
logia we find ourselves in perplexity. His 

1 Convito, ii. 13 ; 5. 



28 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

explanations do not explain. The attempt to 
derive from them a consistent theory of his 
mental changes is attended with great diffi- 
culties. If the " Convito " had never been 
written the problem would have been simpler. 
One trouble is that Beatrice is allegorized; 
she becomes, at length, identified in his mind 
with the divine Wisdom and Purity ; and be- 
tween the symbol and the thing symbolized 
the thought moves freely. " We have ad- 
mitted/' says Mr. Lowell, " that Beatrice Por- 
tinari was a real creature, but how real she 
was, and whether as real to the poet's mem- 
ory as to his imagination, may fairly be ques- 
tioned. She shifts, as the controlling emo- 
tion or the poetic fitness of the moment 
dictates, from a woman loved and lost to a 
gracious exhalation of all that is fairest in 
womanhood and most divine in the soul of 
man, and ere the eye has defined the new 
image, it has become the old one again or 
another mingled of both." 1 

The fact appears to be that the " Convito " 
is a failure. It attempts to explain certain 
aberrations of the affections, but the attempt 
breaks down and is abandoned. He feels that 

1 Literary Essays, iv. 206. 



DANTE, THE POET 29 

his disloyalty of mind and heart are not to be 
accounted for, but to be confessed and for- 
saken. The pure ideal lays its spell upon him, 
and he comes back to the task of revealing to 
men all that he knew or could learn of that di- 
vine Wisdom and Love, whose revelation to him 
had come through the ascended and glorified 
Beatrice. This is the motive of the " Divina 
Commedia." His own words are the best ex- 
planation of the purpose of the poem. " The 
aim of the whole and the individual parts is to 
bring those who are living in this life out of 
a state of misery and to guide them to a state 
of happiness." To show man the nature of 
the sin that threatens his ruin, of the retribu- 
tion that pursues him, of the discipline that 
restores him, of the blessedness that awaits 
him — this is the sublime task to which he 
consecrates his powers. 

The framework of the poem is familiar to 
most of us. Dante is wandering in a gloomy 
and tangled wood, which symbolizes this pre- 
sent world, and finds himself at the foot of a 
hill — the height of virtue — whose summit 
invites him; but at the beginning of the ascent 
a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf — passion, 
pride, and avarice — infest his path and drive 



30 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

him backward to the valley. Here in his dis- 
tress appears to him the spirit of the old Latin 
poet Vergil, whom Beatrice has sent to be his 
gnide on a journey, first through Hell and 
then through Purgatory, at whose confines 
Beatrice herself will meet him and conduct 
him through Paradise. 

Hell, according to Dante's cosmography, is 
a deep funnel-shaped pit, sinking into the 
earth not far from Jerusalem. This pit has 
been formed by the fall of Satan, who, when 
he was cast out of heaven, " was hurled," in 
the words of Dr. Witte, " not merely down 
to the earth, but deep into its bowels, even to 
the dead centre, the pivot of the Universe, 
the deepest point of all, and the farthest re- 
moved from the presence and the light of 
God." 1 The steep slopes of this pit are broken 
by concentric circles or galleries, upon which 
sinners of progressive grades of wickedness 
receive the recompense for the deeds done in 
the body. At the bottom of this pit is Luci- 
fer himself, frozen fast in solid ice, — which 
is not the conventional theory of his environ- 
ment. Beyond this centre a narrow shaft ex- 
tends to the surface of the earth on the other 

i Essays on Dante, p. 104. 



DANTE, THE POET 31 

side, and near the exit thereof rises the cone- 
shaped Mount of Purgatory, whose convex 
corresponds to the concave of Hell ; the one 
was heaped up by the same force that hol- 
lowed out the other. Round this mountain 
run terraces connected by stairways up which 
are toilfully climbing those who need to be 
purified by discipline before they are admitted 
to the life of the blessed. On its summit is the 
Terrestrial Paradise, from which souls ascend 
to the Celestial Paradise. 

The abode of the blessed is fashioned in 
Dante's dream after the conceptions of the 
Ptolemaic astronomy, as nine concentric 
spheres ; the first seven were presided over by 
the sun, the moon, and the five planets then 
known, the eighth was the heaven of the fixed 
stars, the ninth the Primum Mobile, the crys- 
talline fountain of all energy and movement, 
which revolves from east to west once in 
twenty-four hours and carries all the interior 
spheres round with it ; above and encompass- 
ing all is the Empyrean, the dwelling-place 
of the Eternal Light, uncreated, boundless, 
motionless, where elect spirits enjoy the beati- 
fic vision and are satisfied. 

The structural formalism of this poem seems 



32 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

at first almost a childish device. Each part 
contains thirty-three cantos, representing the 
thirty-three years of Christ's life on the earth ; 
and in the terza rima, in which the whole poem 
is written, we are supposed to find a recognition 
of the Trinity. The genius of Dante appears 
in transcending these symbolic limitations, and 
in filling such artificial forms with abounding 
life. 

What Dante sees in this eventful journey 
is the natural reaction of conduct upon the 
character. His " Inferno " is a great sermon 
upon the text, " Whatsoever a man soweth 
that shall he also reap." The greatest ideal- 
ist of all literature is Dante, yet his poem 
is in one way tremendously realistic. An 
engineer could almost construct the Pit from 
his specifications. The figures that he brings 
before our eyes, any modern illustrator could 
easily reproduce, as Dore has done. The 
physical environment of these doomed souls is 
pictured with horrible distinctness. But the 
facts, after all, with which we are dealing, are 
the facts of the inner life ; the environment 
has not made these people, it is they who have 
made the environment. Every one of them 
can say, and does say, in every touch of de- 



DANTE, THE POET 33 

scription by which he is brought before us, 
" Myself am hell." " The City of Dreadful 
Night " which he paints for us, is the dark 
abode which evil minds and perverse wills 
have created for themselves. It is no mere 
arbitrary infliction of sufferings, it is the 
logical outcome of their own conduct. 

We must not, indeed, expect to find the 
ethical judgments of Dante infallible. He 
was a child of the thirteenth century, and his 
mind moved in the twilight of that mediaeval- 
ism. It shocks us to find him consenting to 
the eternal exclusion from God's presence of 
those noble spirits whom he describes with such 
eloquence, and whom he found in the Limbo 
near the entrance of the Dolorous City: " Here 
there was no plaint that could be heard, except 
of sighs which caused the eternal air to tremble. 
And this arose from the sadness, without tor- 
ment, of the crowds that were many and great 
both of children and of women and men." l 
And Vergil, his guide, who is himself a 
denizen of this first circle, explains the con- 
dition of its inhabitants : " Thou askest not 
what spirits are these thou seest ? I wish thee 
to know before thou goest farther that they 

1 Carlyle's Inferno, Canto iv. 



34 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

sinned not. And though they have merit, it 
suffices not ; for they had not Baptism, which 
is the portal of the faith that thou believest. 
And seeing they were before Christianity, 
they worshiped not God aright. And of 
these am I myself. For such defects, and for 
no other fault are we lost ; and only in so 
far afflicted that without hope we live on in 
desire." * 

Dante wishes to know whether any of the 
good have ever been led forth from this confine- 
ment, and Vergil tells him of the descent into 
Hell of Christ, after his crucifixion, and of his 
bearing away with him to the abode of the 
blessed, Adam and Abel and Noah and Abra- 
ham and Moses and David and others many : 
" and I would have you know," he says, " that, 
before these, human spirits were not saved." 
It is evident that Dante is sorry for this un- 
numbered throng of noble men and women and 
of innocent unbaptized children, forever shut 
out of Paradise for no fault of their own, whose 
sighs make the eternal air to tremble ; but there 
is not a sign of moral revulsion at their hapless 
fate : this is the doctrine of mother church, 
and he accepts it without a qualm. 

1 Carlyle's Inferno, Canto iv. 



DANTE, THE POET 35 

Nor can we always recognize the accuracy 
of Dante's moral perspective in judging sins. 
We cannot quite understand why heretics 
who denied the immortality of the soul should 
be pluDged into a lower hell than the avari- 
cious and the incontinent, nor why suicides 
should be punished more condignly than mur- 
derers. On the whole, however, the insight 
is wonderfully true. 

A grim humor gleams out now and then, as 
when he finds outside the gates of Hell a mis- 
erable throng of the pusillanimous — " those 
who lived without infamy and without praise. 
Mingled are they with the angels who were 
not rebels nor were faithful to God, but were 
for themselves. The heavens chased them 
out in order to be not less beautiful, nor doth 
the depth of Hell receive them, because the 
damned would have some glory from them." ! 
Dante, like Browning and Kipling, and every 
apostle of the strenuous life, hates the sin of 
" the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin." 

As we descend with him through the cir- 
cles of this dismal abyss, we marvel with him 
at the scenery and the surroundings of these 
victims of their own misdoing. 
1 Norton's Hell, p. 12, 



36 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

" I came unto a place mute of all light, 

Which billows as the sea does in a tempest, 
If by opposing winds 't is combated. 

The infernal hurricane that never rests 
Hurtles the spirits onward in its rapine; 
Whirling them round, and smiting, it molests them. 

When they arrive before the precipice, 

There are the shrieks, the plaints, and the laments, 
There they blaspheme the puissance divine. 

I understood that unto such a torment 
The carnal malefactors were condemned, 
Who reason subjugate to appetite. 

And, as the wings of starlings bear them on 
In the cold season in large band and full, 
So doth that blast the spirits maledict; 

It hither, thither, downward, upward drives them; 
No hope doth comfort them forevermore, 
Not of repose, but even of lesser pain." 1 

What a vision is this of the eternal unrest 
which a life of incontinence engenders! And 
here is a picture of the avaricious : — 

t( E'en as a billow on Charybdis rising, 
Against encountered billow dashing breaks, 
Such is the dance this wretched race must lead, 
Whom more than elsewhere numerous here I found; 
From one side and the other, with loud voice, 
Both roll'd on weights by main force of their breasts, 
Then smote together, and each one forthwith 
Roll'd them back voluble, turning again, 
Exclaiming, these, ' Why holdest thou so fast ? ' 
These answering, * And why castest thou away? ' 
So still repeating their despiteful song, 
They to the opposite point on either hand 

1 Longfellow's Inferno, v. 28-45. 



DANTE, THE POET 37 

Travers'd the horrid circle; there arrived, 

Both turn'd them round, and through the middle space 

Conflicting met again." 2 

This is what we sometimes describe on earth 
as competition. Dante's idea is that those 
who devote their lives to it here may expect 
to go on with it forever ; that it becomes an 
irresistible habit, the nightmare of eternity. 

The sullen and the melancholy are plunged 
in putrid mud : " There are people under- 
neath the water who sob and make it bubble 
at the surface as thy eye may tell thee, which- 
ever way it turns. Fixed in the slime they 
say : Sullen were we in the sweet air that is 
gladdened by the sun, carrying lazy smoke 
within our hearts ; now He we here sullen in 
the black mire. This hymn they gurgle in 
their throats, for they cannot speak it in full 
words." 2 

The suicides, who despised their bodies, in- 
habit trees ; usurers have lost their identity 
and masquerade as money-bags. " The flat- 
terers," says Dr. Harris, condensing many 
pages of this narrative, " wallow in filth. They 
are engaged in destroying the rational self- 

1 Cary's Inferno, vii. 22-36. 

2 Carlyle's Inferno, vii. 117-126. 



38 WITNESSES OF TEE LIGHT 

estimate of those whom they flatter by call- 
ing evil good and good evil, and producing a 
confusion between clean and unclean. The 
Simonists buy and sell the offices of the church 
for money, and are plunged, likewise, head first 
into round holes or purses while flames scorch 
the soles of their feet. As others follow them 
they sink toward the bottom of the earth, 
gravitating toward pelf. Their deeds directly 
destroy the spiritual by making it subservient 
to money and material gain ; they invert the 
true order of the spiritual and material and 
symbolically place the head where the feet 
should be." 1 

Dante finds one of the popes who had sold 
bishoprics and offices for money in this in- 
verted posture, with flames licking the soles 
of his feet ; he seems to be gratified at com- 
ing upon him there, and administers to him 
a roasting not much gentler than that of the 
sulphurous flame : — 

" I pray thee tell me now how great a treasure 
Our Lord demanded of St. Peter, first, 
Before he put the keys into his keeping. 
Truly he nothing asked but ' follow me.' 
Nor Peter nor the rest asked of Matthias 
Silver or gold, when he by lot was chosen 

1 The Spiritual Sense of Dante's Divina Commedia, p. 68. 



DANTE, THE POET 39 

Unto the place the guilty soul had lost. 

Therefore stay here, for thou art justly punished, 
And keep safe guard o'er the ill-gotten money." l 

Dante was a good Churchman, but he was 
not, I dare say, a believer in papal infallibil- 
ity, for he finds several popes in Hell, and 
brings back word that the pope even then 
reigning was daily expected to arrive there. 

The diviners, soothsayers, and astrologists, 
who make a trade of an assumed knowledge 
of the future, are pictured as "wondrously 
distorted, from the chin to the commencement 
of the chest," so that the face was turned to- 
ward the loins, and they had to come back- 
ward, for to look before them was denied. 
On which let us hear Dr. Harris's subtle com- 
ment : — 

" One who knows the future knows it as 
already happened, and hence turns all events 
into something that has already happened, that 
is to say, into a past. For him there is no pre- 
sent or future ; all is past time. Hence the 
meaning of the punishment, by twisting the 
head around so as to look backward. They 
look at all as past, instead of standing like 
rational beings between the past and the f u- 

1 Longfellow's Inferno, xix. 90-98. 



40 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

ture, and on the basis of the accomplished 
facts of the past, building new possibilities 
into facts by the exercise of their wills." 1 

I can dwell no longer on this symbolism. 
The grim scenery of Hell I have not sought 
to reproduce for you ; you may go to Dore 
for that. It is rather the substance of Hell 
as Dante conceives it — the inevitable conse- 
quences of evil doing — that I have cared to 
dwell upon. All is symbolic, of course ; but 
the reality here symbolized is as stern and sure 
a reality as human reason can contemplate. 

One thing we may remark before we pass 
from the " Inferno/' — the clear judgment of 
the poet in representing sins that undermine 
society as worse than sins which degrade the 
individual. The men who used public trusts 
corruptly, the men who sold office or official 
power for money, the men who had betrayed 
for gain the city or the state, Dante thrusts 
into the deepest Hell ; he ranks them as worse 
than drunkards and debauchees, or even than 
the murderers. " In the fifth ditch," says Dr. 
Harris, "are punished the sinners who sell 
public offices for money. They sell justice, 
too, for money ; [and they would, of course, 

1 The Spiritual Sense of Dante's Divina Commedia, p. 69. 



DANTE, THE POET 41 

have sold franchises and contracts for money 
if they had had any to sell] thus confusing all 
moral order. They are plunged in boiling 
pitch and tormented by demons with long 
forks. Dante is actually diverted at the pun- 
ishment of these mischief-makers, with whom 
he has become so well acquainted through the 
politics of his time." * 

Dante's moral perspective is perfectly accu- 
rate at this point. If there is any class of 
malefactors whose misdeeds deserve torments 
most dire, it is these who thus make public 
office a source of private gain. They are do- 
ing what they can to make society impossible, 
and to bring hell to earth. It would be an 
immense benefit to the world if they could all 
be sent straight to the place which Dante has 
provided for them. 

In passing with Dante and Vergil from the 
dismal Pit to the hopeful Mountain we expe- 
rience a great sense of relief. The second 
book of the Commedia is far less known than 
the first, but it is better worth knowing. Its 
scenery is less weird, its symbolisms less gro- 
tesque, but its insight is no less true. For all 

1 Spiritual Sense, pp. 69, 70. 



42 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

these souls in Purgatory there is hope. They 
are suffering, but it is good discipline ; they 
are all looking forward to deliverance. There 
is no bitterness here, but good- will and help- 
fulness ; the soul is at one with God and with 
its kind. This is a steep and rugged moun- 
tain, up whose spiral terraces they are climb- 
ing, but the higher they go the easier is the 
ascent. 

The disciplinary sufferings which Dante 
has provided for these various classes of peni- 
tents are not less suggestive than his reports 
of penalties in the "Inferno." The angel 
who keeps the gate of Purgatory inscribes on 
the forehead of each who enters seven P's — 
2^eccata — representing the seven deadly sins 
which are to be purged away in the ascent. 
As the penitent goes up from one terrace to 
another, having been cleansed from the sin of 
which the lower circle was the place of disci- 
pline, he hears a sound of music, one of the 
seven stigmata drops from his forehead, and 
his load is lightened, so that the ascent is 
easier. 

On the lowest terrace souls are cleansed 
from pride. Heavy weights are given them 
to carry, which bend them to the earth. On 



DANTE, THE POET 43 

the mountain wall of the terrace are carved 
in white marble beautiful representations of 
true humility, and in the pavement over which 
they must go with downcast faces are sculp- 
tured scenes from history which tell of the 
wars that pride entails. Thus they are chas- 
tened for their pride in body and mind. 

The next terrace is the purge of envy ; and 
the penitents have their eyelids sewn together 
with iron wire, because their sin was one that 
made them blind to the good in their fellow- 
men. For them there are no sculptured 
scenes to admonish them of their fault and 
draw them to virtue, but voices in the air are 
heard praising generous deeds and rehearsing 
the miseries of those who have been the prey 
of envious passion. 

On the third ledge the wrathful are disci- 
plined; the slothful on the fourth, the ava- 
ricious on the fifth, the gluttonous and the 
intemperate on the sixth, the lustful on the 
seventh ; thence through a baptism of fire 
the soul ascends to the earthly Paradise. 

On all this journey there is high discourse 
between Dante and Vergil, and sweet morsels 
of conversation with the ascending souls ; 
many of the deep things of philosophy, many 



44 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

of the vital truths of conduct, many of the 
burning questions of social and political sci- 
ence occupy their thoughts. One willingly 
lingers on the mount of purification, where 
the scenery is often so beautiful, — 

" Gold and fine silver, ceruse, cochineal, 

India's rich wood, heaven's lucid blue serene, 
Or glow that emeralds freshly broke reveal, 

Had all been vanquished by the varied sheen 
Of this bright valley, set with shrubs and flowers, 
As less by greater ; " 

where the twilights are so lovely : 

" 'T was now the hour that brings to men at sea 

Who in the morn have bid sweet friends farewell, 

Fond thoughts and longing with them back to be, 
And thrills the pilgrim with a tender spell 

Of love, if haply, new upon his way, 

He faintly hears a chime from some far bell 

That seems to mourn the dying of the day ; " 1 

where morning comes with such a tender grace: 

" Just at the hour when her sad lay begins 
The little swallow, near unto the morning, 
Perchance in memory of her former woes, 
And when the mind of man, a wanderer 

More from the flesh and less by thought imprisoned, 
Almost prophetic in its visions is ; " 2 

where, amidst sore pains and under galling 
burdens there is so much of human friendship ; 

i Parsons's Purgatorio, vii., viii. 

2 Longfellow's Purgatorio, ix. 13-18. 



DANTE, THE POET 45 

and where the mountain itself trembles with 
joy and the Gloria in Excelsis breaks forth 
whenever a penitent finishes one stage of his 
discipline and goes upward purified to freer 
and larger life. 

One vital element the Christian of to-day 
misses in all this discipline. There is no sug- 
gestion of the personal friendship of Christ in 
the experience of these penitents. They are 
not comforted and encouraged by communion 
with Him. He is not here. He is far away 
in that world of light to which they are climb- 
ing. He has done his work once for all ; He 
has made his sacrifice for them, and they have 
availed themselves of it, sacramentally ; but 
they never think of Him as walking with 
them by the way and sharing with them their 
conflicts and their victories. It is a strange 
defect of the interpretation. 

The spirit of Jesus is here, in the lives of 
the penitents, in their sympathy with one an- 
other, in their prayers for those who are com- 
ing after them; but that sense of his presence, 
that comradeship with Him which has been 
so deep an experience in the lives of all the 
great saints, Catholic and Protestant, from 
Saint Paul and Saint Bernard to Phillips 



46 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

Brooks, Dante does not find in his study of the 
souls upon the upward way. 

At the entrance of the earthly Paradise 
Vergil resigns his charge, and Dante, under 
the guidance of the fair Matilda, who repre- 
sents virtue in action, beholds an apocalyptic 
vision of the triumph of Christ and his church. 
Then, out of the highest heaven, descends to 
him the glorified Beatrice of his life's dream 
to lead him through the shining pathway of 
Paradise to the Beatific Vision : — 

" Ere now have I beheld, as day began, 

The eastern hemisphere, all tinged with rose, 

And the other heaven, with fair serene adorned, 
And the sun's face, uprising, overshadowed, 
So that by tempering influence of vapors 
For a long interval the eye sustained it ; 

Thus, from the bosom of a cloud of flowers 
Which from those hands angelical ascended, 
And downward fell again inside and out 
Over her snow-white veil with olive cinct, 
Appeared a lady under a green mantle, 
Vested in color of the living flame." 

By the awe and the thrill which as a child he 
had felt in her presence, once more his whole 
soul is shaken, and deeper even than this is 
the sense of shame for his own misdeeds with 
which the sight of her heavenly purity over- 
whelms him. There is humble confession and 



DANTE, THE POET 47 

forgiveness ; the waters of Lethe wash away 
the memory of the evil of his life and the 
waters of Eunoe revive the remembrance of 
life's good ; thus is he cleansed and fitted for 
the flight through Paradise. 

On that great journey we cannot now fol- 
low him. Let Mr. Symonds give you, in a few 
swift sentences, the spirit of this vision : — 

" Throughout these regions hope is swal- 
lowed in fruition, prayer is lost in praise. By 
heavenly alchemy the woes of earth are turned 
to gladness, and the whole world in the light 
of God seems beautiful. . . . The souls dis- 
play their happiness by increase of radiance. 
' From joy in heaven splendor grows like smiles 
on earth/ Here light and love and joy are 
one, a triune element in which the spirits dance 
and sing. . . . Melody and movement are the 
life of Paradise as light its element and love 
its joy, and as its science is the sight of God's 
unclouded lustre. . . . The state of the saints 
is one of boundless love. There is no jealousy 
and no disparity in heaven. When a stranger 
comes they cry, c See one who will increase 
our love.' 

" It is a strange world, this Paradise con- 
ceived by Dante, unlike anything that earlier 



48 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

poet dreamed or ever saw in trance revealed 
to him. . . . None but the purest soul could 
have rejoiced to bathe itself in that illimitable 
sea of love. The 6 endless morn of light ' 
which Milton dreamed of Dante realized. His 
spirit ' shaping wings ' for the eternal shore, 
in exile, age, and disappointment, sang these 
deathless songs of joy — so high, so piercing, 
that the ear scarcely sustains their intense 
melody. 

" To appreciate the " Paradiso " rightly, we 
require a portion of Shelley's or Beethoven's 
soul. It is only some c unbodied joy,' some 
spirit rapt by love above the vapors and the 
sounds of earth that dares to soar or can 
breathe long in this ethereal rare atmosphere. 
. . . What a man brings to Dante's poem he 
will find there. Those to whom music, light, 
and love are elemental as the air they breathe 
will be at home in Paradise." 1 

Here we must part with our light-bearer. 
Miss Rossetti's fine interpretation is called 
" The Shadow of Dante ; " less than that I 
have shown you ; it is but the thinnest wraith 
of him that you have seen to-night. If I could 
have had seven evenings instead of one I 

1 Introduction to the Study of Dante, pp. 184, 185. 



DANTE, THE POET 49 

might have helped you to see Dante Alighieri, 
to hear him, perhaps to love him. We must 
content ourselves with this glimpse of the 
father of modern literature, the fiery cham- 
pion of freedom and justice, the clear witness 
to the great verities revealed in the Incarna- 
tion of the Christ, the exile and the wanderer, 
who, for his fidelity to truth, was banished 
from his home and forced to eat the bitter 
bread of poverty ; the strong-faced man, with 
aquiline profile and hollow cheeks and eyes, 
with fire glowing in their depths, whose words 
were few save when his soul was stirred, and 
to whom the children pointed as they saw his 
gaunt figure and his downcast visage upon 
the street, saying, "Hush! he has been in 
hell ! " — above all, the great prophet and in- 
terpreter of human life, who has bound the 
present and the future together with indissol- 
uble bonds, and has shown us, through the 
shadows which his imagination has evoked, 
so much of the substance of both hell and 
heaven. 

Michelangelo, who was born a century and 
a half after Dante's death, knew the Comme- 
dia almost by heart, and filled the margins of 
his sumptuous copy with annotations and pen- 



50 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

cil-sketches of its scenes. With Michelangelo's 
sonnet npon Dante our study may fitly close : — 

" No tongue can tell of him what should be told, 
For on blind eyes his splendor shines too strong ; 
'T were easier to blame those who wrought him wrong, 
Than sound his least praise with a mouth of gold. 

He, to explore the place of pain was bold, 

Then soared to God, to teach our souls by song ; 
The gates heaven oped to bear his feet along, 
Against his just desire his country rolled. 

Thankless I call her, and to her own pain 

The nurse of fell mischance ; for sign take this, 
That ever to the best she deals more scorn : 

Among a thousand proofs, let one remain : 

Though ne'er was fortune more unjust than his, 
His equal or his better ne'er was born." 1 

1 The Sonnets of Michelangelo^ Translated by John Adding- 
ton Symonds, II. 



II 

MICHELANGELO, THE ARTIST 



Rude and unpleasing as they may sometimes be, his figures are 
never petty nor ordinary. In these bold forms, grandly outlined, 
and executed with unsurpassable breadth and freedom, he sets 
before us a higher type of being, in whose presence everything 
low falls from us, and our feelings experience the same elevation 
that they do before true tragedy. Lastly, that which ever and 
anew sympathetically attracts us, even to those of his figures 
which we at first found repellent, is the fact that they are in- 
wardly allied to the best within us, to our own striving after all 
that is high and ideal. — Wilhelm Lubke. 

No one, not even the dullest, not the weakest, not the laziest 
and lustfullest, not the most indifferent to ideas, or the most 
tolerant of platitudes and paradoxes, can pass him by without 
being arrested, quickened, stung, purged, stirred to uneasy self- 
examination by so strange a personality, expressed in prophecies 
of art so pungent. — John Addington Symonds. 

He divorced himself from the Renaissance to join with the 
great Christian school of a preceding time. He is great because 
in the vaulting of the Sistine Chapel he recreated the prophets 
and the sybils and impressed them all with the nobility of his 
own soul. He is great, above all, through his suffering. In the 
presence of those strange figures of the Medici tombs we hear 
that cry which man would ever stop his ears against, and yet 
perforce must always listen to hear, — the cry of suffering of the 
human soul. — Marcel Reymond. 



MICHELANGELO BUOXAROTTI (attributed to Bugiardixi) 



II 

MICHELANGELO, THE ARTIST 

When Dante died, in 1321, his great suc- 
cessor Petrarch was seventeen years old. Pe- 
trarch's father was one of those White Guelf s 
who had been banished from Florence with 
Dante, nineteen years before. I bring these 
dates together because Petrarch was the first 
great figure of the Renaissance on the side of 
learning and letters. 

What was this Renaissance, this rebirth of 
civilization in Europe ? What were the causes 
which produced it and the signs by which it 
was manifested ? 

In the downfall of the old Roman Empire 
and the triumph of Christianity, the art and 
the learning of Greece and Rome practically 
disappeared. For this two reasons may be 
given. 

The struggle between Christianity and Pa- 
ganism was a fight to the death ; it soon be- 
came evident that one or the other must go 



54 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

down. Doubtless there were surreptitious 
and unconscious compromises, and Christian- 
ity did incorporate into its life Pagan ele- 
ments — some that were beneficial and some 
that were baleful ; but for the most part the 
two systems stood in sharp antagonism, and 
the life of the one meant the death of the 
other. The learning and the art of Greece 
and Rome were, in the minds of the early 
Christians, inextricably mingled with the Pa- 
gan religion ; they could not discriminate ; 
all went into the pit together. Just so, in a 
later century, the Puritans stripped their lives 
of beauty, because beauty was an essential 
element of the ritual against which they re- 
volted. 

The other reason for the disappearance of 
the classic culture was the fact that the untu- 
tored people who came down from the Ger- 
man forests and took possession of Italy and 
Rome were not at all ready to receive and ap- 
propriate these treasures of art and learning. 
Some centuries must pass before they would 
be sufficiently civilized to enjoy the sculptures 
of Phidias and Praxiteles, and the poems of 
Sophocles and Horace, and the reasonings 
of Plato and Cicero. While, therefore, the 



MICHELANGELO, THE ARTIST 55 

germs of this ancient art and learning were 
never wholly destroyed, there was small chance 
for them, among the tangled growths of the 
Middle Ages, to come to full fruition. 

Christianity itself — the Christianity of the 
church — was grievously debased and adul- 
terated in its struggle with this mass of medi- 
aeval barbarism. The pure doctrines of the 
New Testament were mixed with all sorts of 
superstitions and absurdities. The vital ele- 
ments were there, and the life would at length 
triumph over all these deformities and para- 
sitic infestations, but many centuries would 
pass before the regeneration would be com- 
plete. During all this period one of the de- 
fects of Christianity was, no doubt, its con- 
tempt for the art and learning of the old 
world. That antagonism was natural and in- 
evitable, but it was, nevertheless, injurious to 
Christianity. 

We have, then, in the Middle Ages a tri- 
angular combat : the Pagan Culture, the Chris- 
tian Faith, the Barbarian Power, each arrayed 
against both the others. Christianity must 
set itself in array against Paganism because 
of its idolatries and immoralities, and in so 
doing it separated itself from the art and 



56 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

learning of the old world and greatly steril- 
ized its own life. 

Christianity must convert and subdue the 
barbarians of the North, but, as was inevita- 
ble, it stooped to conquer, and the pure faith 
was sadly alloyed with many a gross admix- 
ture of superstition. But the transformation 
of the tribes, though slow and painful, was 
gradually accomplished, and when the peoples 
were led out of the wilderness they were ready 
for the reviving touch upon their lives of the 
ancient art and learning. Christianity, freed 
from the deadly grasp of Paganism, had sub- 
dued European barbarism, and was now wait- 
ing to be reconciled, on such terms as it could 
make, with what was best in the ancient cul- 
ture. 

The crusades made ready for this recon- 
ciliation, for the returning crusaders brought 
back from the East reports of a civilization 
more advanced than that of Europe ; and the 
capture of Constantinople by the Turks in 
1453 scattered the Greek scholars and their 
books all over Europe, and gave an immense 
impulse to the study of the ancienfr litera- 
ture. 

The beginning of the Renaissance, or Re- 



MICHELANGELO, THE ARTIST 57 

vival of Learning, is, then, difficult to fix. Pe- 
trarch is, as I have said, generally counted as 
its first great name ; yet you do not forget 
that Dante was full of the ancient learning ; 
that Vergil was his guide through the lower 
regions; that he mingles the demigods and 
heroes of the old mythology promiscuously 
with Hebrew prophets and saints in the 
trenches of the Pit and on the terraces of 
Purgatory, and that his enthusiasm for the 
ancient literature is always breaking forth in 
his song. Still, it must be said that Dante, 
in his conceptions of life, was essentially me- 
diaeval, while Petrarch had imbibed the spirit 
of the Greek culture. In his poetry, as in 
the tales of Boccaccio, there was but little of 
the allegorical and the mystical ; we have a 
simpler style, and a more direct look upon 
nature. From this day forward the influence 
of the Greek learning and art steadily grows. 
In Italy this movement had its rise, and its 
greatest gains were here harvested. The 
Latin classics, a long-despised inheritance, 
were recovered, and studied with passionate 
devotion. Old manuscripts were sought out 
and edited and printed ; libraries of them 
were collected ; princes devoted their revenues 



58 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

to the new learning. Nor did their zeal ex- 
haust itself in the rehabilitation of Latinity ; 
the Greek language was also resurrected, and 
the Attic philosophers and poets were read in 
their own tongue with wondering delight. 

The impulse traveled north from Italy, and 
the effect of it upon the life of Europe was 
marvelous. For now that the old learning 
had come back and its conceptions had begun 
to mingle in men's minds with the Christian 
ideals, it was evident at once that there were 
still radical differences between them. The 
touch of the new learning upon the old life 
was like the Prince's kiss upon the lips of the 
Sleeping Beauty, but there were armed men 
in the retinue thus roused who had a right 
to challenge the authority of the newcomer. 
That the beauty of nature is worthy of our 
admiration, and that the natural joys of life 
are not to be despised, was the truth that 
the recovered culture brought back to men's 
thought ; but there was great danger that, in 
the eagerness with which they welcomed this 
message, the deeper truth, that spiritual per- 
fection is the supreme thing, and that we 
attain unto this only through struggle and 
conflict, would be neglected or forgotten. 



MICHELANGELO, THE ARTIST 59 

Through the whole period of the Renaissance 
the spirit of the Pagan culture, which makes 
the love of natural beauty supreme, was con- 
tending for the mastery with the spirit of 
Christianity, which exalts and crowns the spir- 
itual nature. To unite the two and give each 
its proper place was the problem, and it was 
not to be solved without toil and strife. 
The precious elements in the Pagan culture 
must be regained, but they must not be al- 
lowed to extinguish the more precious elements 
which Christianity had developed. 

A recent writer tells us that the culminat- 
ing point of the Renaissance, the moment of 
the greatest activity of this movement for the 
restoration of the old learning and art, was 
reached about 1475. That was the year 
that Michelangelo was born. Michelangelo 
Buonarotti Simoni is the sonorous Italian 
name which he carried through life. His fa- 
ther was a native of Florence, one of the lesser 
nobles of that illustrious city, poor as a church 
mouse, and of course disabled by the fact of 
his aristocratic birth from productive industry, 
though not from that species of mendicancy 
which is the sole occupation of decayed aris- 
tocrats. Ludovico di Leonardo Buonarotti 



60 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

Simoni had been appointed, in 1474, podesta 
or chief magistrate of the little town of Ca- 
prese in the Caventine, among the hills, south- 
east of Florence, and it was here that Michel- 
angelo was born, March 6, 1475. 

The term of his father's magistracy was 
brief, only part of a year, and the family soon 
returned to Florence. In Settignano, a rustic 
suburb of that city, the Buonarotti possessed 
a small farm, and the infant was put out to 
nurse in the home of one of the tenants. 
The foster-mother was the wife of a stone- 
cutter, and the sculptor used to say, in later 
years, that his love of the chisel and the mal- 
let was drawn in with his nurse's milk. When 
he was of school age a grammarian of Flor- 
ence named Francesco de Urbino had the 
first training of him, but in that school he 
was a dull pupil ; chalk or pencil was always 
in his hand ; the bent of his genius even now 
was irresistible. A certain youth named Gra- 
nacci, then in the studio of the brothers known 
as Ghirlandajo, was his friend ; from him 
he used to get prints, drawings, and sketches 
of various sorts, of which he made copies of 
astonishing accuracy. Nor was he a mere imi- 
tator. Whenever he got a copper-plate he 



MICHELANGELO, THE ARTIST 61 

wanted to reproduce it in color, and if he 
could borrow paints and brushes, he would 
astonish the artists by the freedom and mas- 
tery of his treatment. His father fought 
against his penchant, and did his best to 
scourge it out of him, but it was unavailing ; 
his spirit knew its high calling and election 
of God and was bound to make it sure. Be- 
fore long he had mastered his father's scru- 
ples and was apprenticed to Ghirlandajo for 
three years ; for compensation he was to re- 
ceive six florins the first year, eight the sec- 
ond, and ten the third, the entire wages of 
the three years equaling a little more than 
forty dollars in our money. At once his mas- 
terful faculty asserted itself. How much he 
learned of his teachers is not known ; very 
little, perhaps. But he was surrounded by 
works of art, and he had eyes of his own, and 
an imagination. It was not, I suppose, any 
easier for an ordinary man to teach Michel- 
angelo to draw than for an ordinary mathe- 
matician to teach Isaac Newton the proper 
solution of an algebraic problem. Just as the 
boy Newton saw through the whole operation 
at a glance, long before the teacher could 
even state it, so the young Florentine by an 



62 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

artistic intuition caught with a look the exact 
relation of forms and colors, of lights and 
shades, and the picture or the statue was be- 
fore his mind's eye with absolute definiteness. 
Learning to draw is mainly learning to see, 
and that was a lesson Michelangelo learned 
before he began to make pictures. Indeed he 
seems to have been a veritable genius ; his fac- 
ulties needed not the kind of schooling which 
most of us require. 

Michelangelo was supposed to be learning 
to paint in the studio of Ghirlandajo, but 
some one gave him a piece of refuse marble 
and he borrowed a chisel and mallet and 
struck out of it the head of a grinning Faun, 
which is shown to-day in Florence. His first 
work in marble is a work of art. 

Naturally such a pupil was not likely to be 
in high favor with his master, for Michel- 
angelo was not at all unconscious of his own 
power, and he doubtless knew that no one in 
that workshop could teach him anything. A 
story is told of his finding on the easel a 
drawing, by his master, of a female figure, 
and of his taking the pencil and boldly cor- 
recting the outline, making it visibly truer to 
life. Vasari had the original drawing as a 



MICHELANGELO, THE ABTIST 63 

keepsake, and he says of it : " Wonder it was 
to see the difference of the two styles and to 
note the judgment and ability of a mere boy, 
so spirited and bold, who had the courage to 
chastise his master's handiwork." 1 Such epi- 
sodes did not conduce to harmony in the stu- 
dio of Ghirlandajo. Haydn and Beethoven, 
in later years, repeated this incompatibility of 
great master and greater pupil. The hen is 
a useful fowl, but she is not a good nursing 
mother for the eagle. 

This apprenticeship, for such reasons as 
these, was not to be completed ; after a year 
with Ghirlandajo there came a request from 
Lorenzo the Magnificent for two promising 
pupils to reside with him and study in the 
Medicean gardens of sculpture, and the mas- 
ter, perhaps with some sense of relief, recom- 
mended Michelangelo and his friend Granacci. 

It was not easy to secure the consent of 
Ludovico Buonarotti to the removal of his 
son to the service of Lorenzo. The seedy old 
aristocrat had a notion that they were going 
to make a stone-cutter of the boy ; Granacci 
was obliged to reason long with him to prove 
that the occupation of a sculptor was not 

1 Quoted by Symonds, Life of Michelangelo, i. 17. 



64 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

beneath his son's rank. But when Ludovico 
was summoned into the presence of the Mag- 
nificent his scruples were overcome by the 
offer of a job for himself in the Custom House, 
and the youth was taken under the patronage 
of Lorenzo, in whose palace, from the begin- 
ning of his fifteenth to the beginning of his 
eighteenth year, he had his home. 

It is doubtful whether any other place in 
the world, in that day or any other, could 
have offered him an environment so full of 
stimulus to his intellect and taste. Lorenzo 
de Medici was himself the central figure of 
the Italian Renaissance. It is not necessary 
to estimate his character, but he was a great 
diplomatist, and politician, a great patron of 
art and letters, and a man of no mean accom- 
plishments as poet and critic. 

The Casa Medici was itself a great art mu- 
seum. It was crowded with statues in bronze 
and marble by the best of modern sculptors, 
its walls were hung with paintings by the 
great contemporary artists ; collectors from 
all the East had gathered to its store vases, 
intaglios, coins, every kind of artistic product. 
In a library, which was the marvel of the age, 
were assembled not only the choicest printed 



MICHELANGELO, THE ARTIST 65 

books but the rarest and most precious manu- 
scripts. 

To this honey were drawn the bees of every 
clime. Scholars, philosophers, poets, artists, 
were welcomed by the Magnificent, not as 
guests merely, but as inmates of his home ; 
his table was constantly surrounded by the 
intellectual leaders of civilization. Marsilio 
Ficino, renowned as an interpreter of Plato ; 
Pico della Mirandola, the marvelous Orien- 
talist ; Politian, professor and poet ; Pulci, 
the humorist, with a great array of names less 
illustrious, were dwellers beneath this roof, all 
of them engaged in the studies congenial to 
themselves, and sharing with one another the 
spoils of their common enterprise. " Rarely," 
says Symonds, " at any period of the world's 
history, perhaps only in Athens between the 
Persian and the Peloponnesian wars, has cul- 
ture, in the highest and best sense of that 
word, prospered more than it did in the Flor- 
ence of Lorenzo, through the cooperation and 
mutual zeal of men of eminence, inspired 
by common enthusiasms, and laboring in di- 
verse though cognate fields of study and pro- 
duction.' ' 1 

1 Life of Michelangelo, i. 25. 



66 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

Despite the apprehensions of Ludovico Bu- 
onarotti, the place of Michelangelo in this 
home was not that of a menial. He was but 
a youth, but he was a youth of genius, and 
the recognition which was due to him was not 
withheld. He was dressed as one to the man- 
ner born ; his apartment in the palace was 
a comfortable one ; he had the pocket money 
without which a boy's life is somewhat clouded; 
in all respects his position was that of a son 
and not that of a servant. The democracy of 
culture gave the laws to the table of the Mag- 
nificent ; guests took their seats, not accord- 
ing to their rank, but in the order of their 
arrival, so that Michelangelo might be seated 
any day near the head of the table, and in 
the midst of the great scholars and artists 
who filled the house, and who were already so 
much impressed with his great abilities that 
they freely conversed with him and encour- 
aged him in his high purposes. In this, it 
is evident, they were reflecting the judgment 
of the master of the house, who was wont to 
send often for Michelangelo, to consult him 
regarding the merits of the rare objects of art 
which he was then collecting. 

Thus we find the young artist launched 



MICHELANGELO, THE ARTIST 67 

upon his career under most prosperous skies, 
all the winds and all the tides conspiring to 
set him forward. He was yet to have dark 
days and rough seas enough, but his youth 
was one of the fairest fortune. The small 
office which Lorenzo had given his father pro- 
vided for the wants of his family ; the undi- 
vided attention of the boy could be given to 
the study and the practice of the art to which 
his life was devoted. 

It might be well to pause here and glance 
about us at what is going on in the world 
while Michelangelo is pursuing his studies in 
the Medicean gardens. It is from 1489 to 
1492 that this felicity continues. Looking 
back we remember that Dante had now been 
in his grave one hundred and seventy years, 
and Petrarch, his successor, more than a cen- 
tury ; the seventh Henry is upon the English 
throne ; the reckless and audacious Charles 
VIII. is reigning in France ; the Pope is In- 
nocent VIII., the least innocent of all the 
Innocents, perhaps, and that is a strong say- 
ing ; the Emperor is the parsimonious and pu- 
sillanimous Frederick III. Thirty-nine years 
have passed since the dispersion of the scholars 
by the fall of Constantinople ; by this time, 



68 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

like the persecuted apostles, they have gone 
everywhere, preaching the word. Thirty-eight 
years only have elapsed since the first book 
was printed with movable types, yet it is 
marvelous how rapidly, during that time, the 
number of printed books has increased, and 
how beautifully they are printed ; that famous 
Venetian press of Aldo Manuzio, whose issues 
are so prized by book-lovers in these days, and 
whose pages are so admired by modern book- 
makers, had just been set in operation. The 
Ptolemaic astronomy is still producing ver- 
tigo in thinkers' heads, with its eccentrics and 
epicycles and primum mobile, but its doom is 
sealed ; the Prussian boy Copernicus is now, 
in his eighteenth year, studying medicine at 
Padua ; he will prescribe, presently, for that 
malady. There is no western continent that 
men of the east have yet seen, but there is a 
far Cathay of which they have dreamed, and 
Columbus, during these very years of Angelo's 
residence in the Medicean palace, is getting 
his fleet together, and will sail, in the last of 
these years, in search of lands beyond the sea. 
Are not these eventful times? The whole 
horizon is ablaze with light. 

Of the artists of Italy some of the great 



MICHELANGELO, THE ARTIST 69 

names are already written on tombs ; Brunel- 
leschi, who lifted in air the great dome of 
Florence, has been dead almost half a cen- 
tury ; and Ghiberti, whose gates in front of 
the Florentine baptistery were fit, as Angelo 
said, for the portal of Paradise, a little longer. 
Fra Angelico has been with the angels that 
he loved for nearly two score years, and Lippo 
Lippi for more than a score ; Andrea del 
Sarto is a child of five years old, Raphael is 
a lad of nine, Titian a boy of twelve, and 
Leonardo da Vinci a man of forty ; the world 
must still wait two years for the arrival in 
the flesh of the spirit of Correggio, and four 
for Benvenuto Cellini. In the realm of art it 
will be seen that between the young immor- 
tals and the young mortals great work has 
already been done, and greater is still to come. 
Among the influences which were helping 
to shape the character of the young Michel- 
angelo during these years in the palace of 
Lorenzo none, perhaps, was deeper or more 
decisive than that of the mighty monk Savon- 
arola, whose preaching in the great Duomo 
was shaking Florence as it had never before 
been shaken. In the very year in which the 
boy was summoned by Lorenzo to the palace, 



70 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

the preacher was called by the same potentate 
to return to Florence. He had preached there 
before, to few and listless hearers ; but a bap- 
tism of fire had fallen on him in Lombardy, 
and now the city could not choose but hear 
him. No more trenchant preaching was ever 
heard ; the luxury and frivolity of Florence 
were rebuked with the most terrific invec- 
tive ; the tyranny of rulers, the corruption of 
politics, the heartlessness and oppression of 
the rich, were judged unsparingly, and the 
doom of the eternal judgment was threatened 
against these sinners if they did not speedily 
repent. 

" Michelangelo," says his biographer, " was 
one of his constant listeners at St. Marco 
and the Duomo. He witnessed those stormy 
scenes of religious revival and passionate fa- 
naticism which contemporaries have impres- 
sively described. The shorthand writer to 
whom we owe the text of Savonarola's ser- 
mons at times breaks off with words like 
these : c Here I was so overcome with weep- 
ing that I could not go on.' Pico della Mi- 
randola tells us that the mere sound of the 
monk's voice, startling the voice of the Duomo, 
thronged through all its space with people, 



MICHELANGELO, THE ARTIST 71 

was like a clap of doom ; a cold shiver ran 
through the marrow of his bones, the hairs 
of his head stood on end while he listened. 
Another witness reports : ' The sermons caused 
such terror, alarm, sobbing and tears, that 
every one passed through the streets without 
speaking, more dead than alive.' " 1 

Imagine the impression made upon the 
mind of a youth as sensitive and serious as 
Michelangelo by such intense and terrible 
moral earnestness as that of Savonarola. We 
do not wonder that through all his life he 
treasured the memory of the great monk, 
with whose desires for the reformation of the 
church and the freedom of Florence he so 
heartily sympathized, nor that, in later years, 
his Savonarola and his Bible were studied 
together. Symonds is warranted in his con- 
jecture that "the apocalyptical thunderings 
and voices of the Sistine Chapel owe much 
of their soul-thrilling impressiveness to those 
studies," and Michelet in declaring that " the 
spirit of Savonarola lives again in the frescoes 
of that vault." 2 

Thus we behold the education of the youth 

1 Symonds's Life of Michelangelo, i. 37. 

2 Ibid. p. 38. 



72 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

proceeding under influences of an altogether 
exceptional character. In the home of Lo- 
renzo the Magnificent, for three years, with 
the noonday splendors of the Renaissance 
blazing around him, with such opportunities 
of personal contact with the most vigorous 
and influential minds of his age as few young 
men have enjoyed, he certainly was enabled 
to know and to feel the full force of that 
mighty intellectual movement by which the 
ancient culture returned to take possession of 
the soul of man. And yet he was first and 
last and always a Christian ; the central ideas 
of the Christian religion never lost their 
power over his mind, and under the fiery tui- 
tion of Savonarola they were indelibly burned 
into his experience. Is it not clear that the 
two forces which we have found contending 
for the mastery in the world about him have 
both got possession of his soul ; that his own 
consciousness is sure to be the arena of a 
momentous struggle; that the work of his 
life will be full of the signs of storm and 
stress. 

In 1492 his great patron died and the hal- 
cyon days were at an end. Lorenzo's son 
Piero was a trifler ; soon came the revolution 



MICHELANGELO, THE ARTIST 73 

and swept him from power. Michelangelo 
betook himself to Bologna, and there, for a 
year, he studied Dante and practiced his art, 
producing some good work ; some time in 
1495 he returned to Florence. The city was 
now practically under the power of Savona- 
rola ; a Puritanic seriousness and simplicity 
had replaced the luxurious revels of the later 
Mediceans, and Michelangelo had for a few 
months a quiet breathing spell, in which he 
was able to meditate some excellent work. He 
was now twenty-one years of age, and already 
his chisel had produced several notable stat- 
ues. One of these was a Sleeping Cherub, 
which was soiled to make it look like an an- 
tique (for there were tricks in all trades even 
in those good old times), and sold, but not 
by Angelo, for a large price, to a nobleman 
in Rome. The purchaser found out the fraud, 
but he also discovered the artist and brought 
him straight to Rome. 

It is impossible for me to follow in detail 
the events of the life of Michelangelo from 
this time forward ; let me give, in merest 
outline, first his principal movements from 
place to place ; next a brief reference to 
some of his more important works, and finally 



74 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

some account of his personal qualities and 
friendships. 

From this twenty-first year most of his life 
was spent at Rome, though he returned sev- 
eral times to Florence, each time executing 
there important works which are now among 
the glories of the Tuscan capital. 

To his first residence in Rome we must 
ascribe at least three of his masterpieces, the 
athletic Cupid, now in the South Kensington 
Museum, the Pieta, in St. Peter's at Rome, 
and the Madonna and Child, in the Church 
of Notre Dame at Bruges. These must have 
been prosperous days with him : why his work 
in Rome was interrupted we do not know; 
probably it was some call from that impecu- 
nious family, which was always a burden to 
him, that took him back to Florence after 
nearly four years in the Eternal City. He 
returned to his home with a fresh and grow- 
ing fame, and found important commissions 
awaiting him ; the colossal David, and the 
only movable painting that we can confi- 
dently attribute to him, — the Holy Family 
in the TJffizi Gallery, — are the fruits of this 
sojourn of these years in Florence. The most 
ambitious work of that period, his cartoon of 



MICHELANGELO, THE ABTIST 75 

The Bathers, has perished. In 1505 he was 
called back to Rome by Pope Julius II. The 
new Pope was himself a man of restless en- 
ergy; he wanted to do the greatest things, 
largely for his own glory ; he desired to see 
prodigious works of art rising about him to 
illustrate and commemorate his reign, and 
Michelangelo was clearly the man whose co- 
operation he must secure. The relation be- 
tween Pope Julius and Michelangelo was often 
warlike ; they were two of a kind ; Angelo was 
something of a pope himself, yet they con- 
tinued to have a good deal of affection for 
each other. They quarreled, several times, 
and were reconciled ; the artist once ran away 
to Florence and the Pontiff long besought 
him in vain to return ; after a time, the Pope 
being in Bologna, Angelo compromised so far 
as to go thither to see him ; he would meet 
the Pope halfway. When he was ushered 
into the papal presence, the bishop who pre- 
sented him ventured to apologize for the art- 
ist's recusancy, when the Pope turned upon 
the episcopal apologist and boxed his ears 
and turned him out of the room for insult- 
ing the artist; thus the breach was healed. 
Julius had a great plan for a tomb for him- 



76 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

self at St. Peter's ; that was the work in which 
he sought to employ Michelangelo ; it was 
to be a stupendous construction as Angelo 
sketched it, — three stories high with multi- 
tudes of marble figures, some of them colos- 
sal; it was too big, in fact, for St. Peter's, 
and therefore the old church must be torn 
down and a new one begun which should be 
capacious enough to make room for it. An- 
gelo went to the Carrara marble quarries and 
lived there for many months, getting out the 
big blocks which were to be used in these 
statues, but when he returned to Kome and 
began his work the Pope vacillated ; some 
one persuaded him that it was of ill omen for 
a man to build his own tomb, and finally the 
artist was torn from the task and set to fres- 
coing the vault of the Sistine Chapel. It was 
a bitter disappointment to him. Painting, he 
insisted, was not his trade. It is hinted that 
some of his rivals, fearing his success with the 
sculpture of the tomb, instigated the Pope's 
action, with the hope that his painting would 
prove a failure. If that was their plot they 
reckoned without their host. The Pope lived 
to see the ceiling painted, but the tomb was 
never finished. In his will he provided for 



MICHELANGELO, THE ARTIST 77 

the completion of the work, and Michelangelo 
was held to it by a contract that tormented 
and tantalized him, and became the tragedy 
of his life. They would never let him go on 
with it ; again and again succeeding popes 
called him away for other tasks. The plan 
was modified once or twice, and after thirty- 
six years of heart-breaking suspense and dis- 
traction the work was abandoned and Angelo 
was released from his contract. The only 
parts of the tomb that were completed were 
the colossal Moses, so familiar to us all, and 
two figures of captives, now in the Louvre. 
Other figures were made from his designs, 
but not by his hands. 

Pope Leo X., the successor of Julius, was 
a son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and he 
greatly desired to build architectural monu- 
ments for his family and Florence, and com- 
missioned Angelo to do the work. This, also, 
was for the most part a disappointment and 
weariness to him. His employers did not 
know what they wanted, and the church of 
San Lorenzo, whose facade he was to have 
constructed, never was completed ; after long 
drudgery in the quarries preparing the mar- 
ble for it, and laborious and vexatious delays, 



78 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

Angelo was forced to abandon the labor, and 
the church " still stands/' in the words of 
Mr. Sturgis, " with its brick wall as bare as if 
months of the precious life of a great artist 
had not been wasted in thought for it." * The 
great product of these years at Florence is 
gathered up in the tombs of the Medici, in 
the sacristy of this church, two groups in 
which the genius of the artist appears at its 
brightest. 

The life of Angelo from his fortieth to his 
sixtieth year was full of confusion ; he was 
traveling back and forth from Rome to Flor- 
ence ; much of the time he was kept at work 
for which he had no appetite ; he was buf- 
feted about by the orders of men who did 
not know their own minds. There was a revo- 
lution in Florence, in 1527, in which he took 
part ; they made him engineer in chief, and 
he built the fortifications by which the city 
was defended. In 1534 Pope Paul III. called 
him back to Rome and set him to painting 
the vast fresco of the Last Judgment at the 
northern end of the Sistine Chapel. Finally, 
in 1546, he was made architect in chief of St. 
Peter's church, on which he labored until his 

1 Johnson's Universal Cyclopedia, v. 735. 



MICHELANGELO, THE ARTIST 79 

death. The church had then been in course 
of construction about forty years. Since his 
day the building has been greatly altered, the 
one grand feature which it owes to him is 
the mighty dome, which is one of the archi- 
tectural glories of the world. 

In speaking now of a few of his greatest 
works — for it is but few among" them that I 
can even name — my words must be for the 
greater part a reflection of the judgment of 
critics who have a right, which is not mine, to 
estimate the art work of such a master. To 
the least instructed of observers it is evident 
that we have in all this work something that 
does not appear in the classic marbles. The 
sensuous beauty of the elder art gives place 
to an intensity of life of which those ancient 
sculptors had little conception. One thinks 
of Paul's description of the period of thought- 
less innocence, from which the knowledge of 
the moral law roused him, and set in motion 
the conflict between the lower and the higher 
nature ; the art of Greece shows us human 
nature in that untroubled freedom, when men 
were " alive without the law ; " the art of 
Angelo brings before us the poignant strivings 
of a later day when "the commandment came," 



80 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

and the soul attained unto peace only through 
the mastery of the evil. If Dante, as Lowell 
tells us, was the first great Christian poet, 
Michelangelo is perhaps the first great artist 
whose work represents to us the struggle for 
redemption of the higher nature with the 
lower. It is the sense of this that finds ex- 
pression in the critical moments on which his 
art is so apt to seize. Life, as he feels it, is 
a sublime conflict ; it is not with blind fates 
that we are hopelessly contending ; the will is 
free and there is promise of victory, but it is 
a good fight, and there must be no flinching. 
There has been no mightier preacher of the 
strenuous life than Michelangelo. 

Look at his David — the colossal statue of 
a youth ; the physical immaturity of adoles- 
cence is boldly represented. The moment 
is that in which the youth confronts the 
Philistine ; his left hand upon the shoulder 
grasps the stone in the sling ; his right hand 
reaches back for the cord by which it is sus- 
pended; he stands poised and ready for a 
tremendous effort; his face is full of the 
energy of resolve. It is not this instant, it 
is the next one, that the artist makes you see 
most clearly. 



MICHELANGELO, THE ARTIST 81 

The block from which this statue was hewn 
had been under the chisel of another artist 
who had been attempting some colossal figure 
and had failed. It was placed, half hewn, in 
the hands of Angelo, and he saw the David 
in it. It is said that his work was somewhat 
cramped by the cutting of the other artist, 
but it is difficult to discover such defects in 
the statue. 

The Medicean tombs are later and more 
remarkable productions. Each is an archi- 
tectural construction, with pilasters and 
niches, placed against the marble wall of the 
sacristy ; the figure of each Duke is seated 
in a niche above ; and at the base of each 
are two reclining figures, couched on vacant 
sarcophagi ; the one pair known as Day and 
Night, the other as Dawn and Twilight. The 
Medicean heroes overhead are masterpieces 
of plastic art, but they are rather subordi- 
nate characters, the strength of the work is 
in the symbolical figures. To some one who 
remarked upon this, Angelo is said to have 
replied, dryly, that probably no one would 
care very much about those Dukes after a 
few hundred years. He was quite right ; 
there has been much dispute as to which is 



82 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

Lorenzo of Urbino, and which Giuliano of 
Nemours; neither of them was particularly 
worth remembering. The recumbent figures 
at the base are, however, among the noblest 
products of Angelo's art. It was a dark 
time for Florence when he conceived them — -. 
a time when men were saying in the morn- 
ing, " Would God it were even ! " and in the 
evening, " Would God it were morning ! " 
and Angelo has poured into these symbolic 
figures all the passionate sadness of his soul. 
" Standing before these statues," says Mr. 
Symonds, "we do not cry, How beautiful! 
We murmur, How terrible ! how grand ! Yet, 
after long gazing, we find them gifted with 
beauty beyond grace. In each of them there 
is a palpitating thought, torn from the artist's 
soul and crystallized in marble. It has been 
said that architecture is petrified music. In 
the sacristy of San Lorenzo we feel impelled 
to remember phrases of Beethoven. Each 
of these statues becomes for us a passion, fit 
for musical expression, but turned, like Niobe, 
to stone. They have the intellectual vague- 
ness, the emotional certainty, that belong to 
the motives of a symphony. In their alle- 
gories, left without a key, sculpture has 



MICHELANGELO, THE ARTIST 83 

passed beyond her old domain of placid, 
concrete form. The anguish of intolerable 
emotion, the quickening of the consciousness 
to a sense of suffering, the acceptance of the 
inevitable, the strife of the soul with destiny, 
the burden and the passion of mankind; — 
that is what they contain in their cold chisel- 
tortured marble. It is open to critics of the 
school of Lessing to object that here is the 
suicide of sculpture. It is easy to remark 
that those strained postures and writhen limbs 
may have perverted the taste of lesser crafts- 
men. Yet if Michelangelo was to carve 
Medicean statues after the sack of Rome and 
the fall of Florence, — if he was obliged in 
sober sadness to make sculpture a language 
for his sorrow-laden heart, — how could he 
have wrought more truthfully than this ? " l 

That such was the significance of these 
statues is made plain by the artist's own 
testimony. When the figure of the Night 
was first seen by the public a poet wrote this 
quatrain : — 

" The Night thou seest here posed gracefully 
In act of slumber, was by an Angel wrought 
Out of this stone ; sleeping, with life she 's fraught ; 
Wake her, incredulous wight : she '11 speak to thee." 
1 Life of Michelangelo, ii. 34. 



84 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

Angelo himself, speaking for his statue, 
thus answered : — 

" Grateful is sleep ; but still more sweet, while woe 
And shame endure, 't is to be stone like me, 
And highest fortune not to feel or see ; 
Therefore awake me not : speak low ! speak low ! " 

The legacy of art which Michelangelo has 
left to Rome is far too large for us to reckon. 
The Pieta, in St. Peter's, to which I have re- 
ferred, — a statue of the Virgin holding in 
her lap the dead Christ, — is one of his most 
beautiful productions. The figure of the 
Moses is the best known of his statues; it 
represents him in the moment when he hears, 
on Mount Sinai, the noise of the idolatrous 
revelry in the valley below. " The majestic 
wrath of the figure," says Emerson, " daunts 
the beholder." 

The two great works are the frescoes of the 
Sistine Chapel, — the crowd of historical and 
emblematic figures on the vaulting of the ceil- 
ing and the Last Judgment on the north wall 
above the altar. The frescoed ceiling is one 
of the most stupendous pieces of work ever 
undertaken by man. It is probable that the 
artist had assistance in the preparation of the 
plaster, and in the laying on of the color in 



MICHELANGELO, THE ARTIST 85 

some of the figures, but by far the larger part 
of the work was done by his own hands. The 
old story was that he finished it in twenty 
months, but that is not only incredible, it has 
been proven to be untrue. More than four 
years were consumed upon it, and that in- 
volves a feat sufficiently prodigious. Day 
after day, month after month, the painter lay 
upon his back upon the scaffold beneath 
the ceiling, looking upward and holding his 
brushes aloft ; the strain upon his nerves was 
so great that his health was broken ; for a 
long time it was nearly impossible for him to 
read without holding the book above the level 
of his eyes. 

The Sistine Chapel is a long and narrow 
room, one hundred and thirty-two feet in 
length and forty-four in breadth ; its ceil- 
ing is a flattened vault with no architectural 
divisions. The first work of the artist was 
therefore to paint upon this vault the repre- 
sentation of an architectural framework, with 
pilasters and brackets and ribbed arches, thus 
dividing the vast space so that his groups 
and figures might be distributed without con- 
fusion. The whole of this surface he cov- 
ered with scenes from Bible history, with ideal 



86 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

representations of Biblical and mythological 
characters, and with a great number of lesser 
figures, in all manner of attitudes. Three 
hundred and forty-three different representa- 
tions of the human form, draped and un draped, 
appear upon this ceiling, most of them life-size 
and many of them colossal. " To speak ade- 
quately of these form poems,' ' says Symonds, 
" would be quite impossible. Buonarotti seems 
to have intended to prove by them that the 
human body has a language inexhaustible in 
symboHsm, every limb, every feature, and every 
attitude being a word full of significance to 
those who comprehend, just as music is a lan- 
guage whereof each chord and phrase has 
correspondence with the spiritual world. . . . 
This is how he closes one of his finest sonnets 
to Yittoria Colonna : — 

1 Xor hath God deigned to show himself elsewhere 
More clearly than in human forms sublime, 
Which, since they image him, compel my love.' 

... It may be asked what poems of action as 
well as of feeling are to be expressed in this 
form language ? The answer is simple. Paint 
or carve the body of a man, and as you do it 
nobly you will give the measure of both high- 
est thought and most impassioned deed. This 



MICHELANGELO, THE ARTIST 87 

is the key to Michelangelo's art. He cared 
but little for inanimate nature. The land- 
scapes of Italy, so eloquent in their beauty 
and sublimity, were apparently a blank to 
him. His world was the world of ideas, tak- 
ing visible form, incarnating themselves in 
man. One language the master had to serve 
him in all need, the language of plastic human 
form ; but it was to him a tongue as rich in 
its variety of accent and intonation as Beetho- 
ven's harmonies." 

Taine, in a vivid description of the twenty 
youthful figures seated upon the cornices of 
the central frescoes, takes up the same theme : 
" Who would suppose that the various atti- 
tudes of the human figure could affect the 
mind with such diverse emotions ? The hips 
actively support ; the breast respires ; the en- 
tire covering of flesh strains and quivers ; 
the trunk is thrown back over the thighs, and 
the shoulder ridged with muscles is about to 
raise the impetuous arm. One of them falls 
backward and draws his grand drapery over 
his thigh, whilst another, with his arm over his 
brow, seems to be parrying a blow. Others 
sit pensive and meditating, with all their 
limbs relaxed . Several are running and spring- 



88 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

ing across the cornice or throwing themselves 
back and shouting. You feel that they are 
going to move and to act, yet you hope that 
they will not, but maintain the same splendid 
attitudes. Nature has produced nothing like 
them, but she ought thus to have fashioned 
the human race. In the ceiling of the Sistine 
she might find all types ; giants and heroes, 
modest virgins, stalwart youths, and sporting 
children ; that charming ' Eve,' so young and 
proud ; that beautiful ' Delphic Sibyl ' who, 
like some nymph of the Golden Age looks out 
with eyes filled with innocent astonishment, 
— all the sons and daughters of a colossal 
militant race who preserved the smile, the se- 
renity, the pure joyousness, the grace of the 
Oceanides of iEschylus or the Nausicaa of 
Homer. The soul of a great artist contains 
an entire world within itself. Michelangelo's 
soul is unfolded here on the Sistine ceiling." * 
Of the other great painting, the " Last 
Judgment," over the altar of the Sistine 
Chapel, but the briefest mention can be made. 
For eight years, between 1534 and 1542, 
Angelo wrought upon it, pouring into it all 
the bitterness and scorn of a deeply suffer- 

1 Voyage en Italie. 



MICHELANGELO, THE ARTIST 89 

ing soul. The years just past had been 
full of disaster to Italy ; the land had been 
overrun, Rome had been sacked by the Con- 
stable of Bourbon ; the scourge had fallen 
upon the church, but no works meet for re- 
pentance had appeared ; the standards of con- 
duct in the political and ecclesiastical world 
were steadily sinking. In Germany and Swit- 
zerland and England the struggle of the Re- 
formation was now in progress; the causes 
which produced it were not less actively at 
work in Italy. Michelangelo could not but 
recall the terrible prophecies of Savonarola, 
and their fiery threats of retribution are em- 
bodied in the horrors of this gigantic picture. 
In the midst of the scene the Christ as Judge 
has risen from the cloud on which he has 
been seated, his face is turned toward those 
on his left hand, his right hand is Kf ted above 
his head as if to hurl a thunderbolt ; away 
from him, staggering backward, plunging 
downward, knotted together in the writhings 
of despair, the lost souls are driven to their 
doom ; on the other side, wakened by the 
trumpets of the seraphs, the dead are rising 
from their graves and mounting upward to 
confront the Judge ; by the side of her Son 



90 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

sits Mary with face averted, as if in pity. It 
is a dreadful picture ; the terribilita of Michel- 
angelo comes to its climax in it : there seems 
to be no note of tenderness in all its stormy 
harmonies ; and yet we know that it is the 
great humanity of the master that inspired it 
all — his holy indignation against the violence 
and deceit and oppression whereof the earth, 
as he saw it, was full. 

In trying now to express some judgment of 
the character of Michelangelo, we find a task 
scarcely less difficult than that which con- 
fronts us when we estimate his art. He is a 
man of vast proportions and mighty energies ; 
his temper is not less titanic than his designs ; 
self - control is often wanting ; outbursts of 
anger are frequent and fierce. An ebullition 
of this sort in his youth provoked a blow 
which disfigured his face for life. He is not 
unjust, but he hates injustice and meanness 
with a hatred which, if not perfect, is at least 
adequate, and he scorches them with his wrath. 
Sometimes, it must be owned, his resentments 
are disproportionate to his provocations. 

In his early years in Rome his intimacies 
were few. For social pleasures he found lit- 



MICHELANGELO, THE ARTIST 91 

tie time, and his habits were solitary. His 
tongue was keen, and some of his sharp say- 
ings are memorable. When Pope Julius 
wanted him to adorn the figures of the ceiling 
with gold he answered, " Those apostles were 
poor men ; they wore no gold." Sebastian 
del Piombo was commissioned to paint a friar 
in a chapel. " He will spoil the chapel," said 
Angelo. "Why?" they demanded. "When 
the friars have spoiled the world, which is so 
large," he said, " it is an easy thing for them 
to spoil such a tiny chapel." A painter pro- 
duced a poor picture with one good figure — 
that of an ox. " Every artist draws his own 
portrait best," said Angelo. 

Yet he was not always ill natured in his 
judgments of other artists. Some one asked 
him how he liked Donatello's statue of St. 
Mark at Florence. " I never saw a figure," 
he answered, " which so thoroughly repre- 
sents a man of probity. If St. Mark was 
like that, we have reason to believe everything 
which he has said." To the martial figure of 
St. George, in the same place, his one word of 
appreciation was all that any artist could have 
asked for. " March ! " he cried. 

Under his testy temper there was humor. 



92 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

And there was tenderness. His fidelity to his 
kindred was exemplary. He was never mar- 
ried. " I have only too much of a wife in this 
art of mine/' he testified. " She has always 
kept me struggling on. My children will be 
the works I leave behind me." His impecu- 
nious father and several scapegrace brothers 
were a heavy burden to him ; to his father he 
was always faithful and filial ; with his bro- 
thers he sometimes lost patience, but his long- 
suffering love failed not. 

His own manner of life was most abstemi- 
ous ; on himself he spent almost nothing ; to 
his relatives and dependents he was generous, 
almost to a fault. 

With some of his brother artists his rela- 
tions were kindly ; he loved and honored 
Titian ; he chid Cellini for trifling work, but 
praised him when he rose to the height of his 
calling. With Leonardo da Vinci, his towns- 
man, he was not on good terms, and with 
Raphael, who was at work at Rome at the 
same time, he had but little to do ; jealousy 
or suspicion, on the one side or the other, kept 
them apart. 

Perhaps the most sacred human influence 
that ever entered the life of Michelangelo 



MICHELANGELO, THE ARTIST 93 

was a friendship of his later years with a 
woman, Vittoria Colonna, the Marchioness of 
Pescara. Her husband had perished years 
before in battle ; to his memory she was loyal, 
and there was nothing of a purely sentimental 
nature in her relations with Buonarotti. She 
was a pure and high-souled woman, a poet 
and a lover of art, with a religious nature 
of great depth and tenderness. The days 
of their friendship were the days when the 
Reformation in northern Europe was shak- 
ing the old church to its centre, and with 
this movement for the uprooting of ecclesias- 
tical abuses, Vittoria Colonna and Michel- 
angelo, although they never separated from 
the church, were in deepest sympathy ; much 
of their converse was on these highest themes. 
The friendship of this clear-minded, sound- 
hearted woman was the greatest blessing that 
ever came to Michelangelo ; it was not until 
his ripe maturity that he knew her; their 
intimacy lasted barely eight years, and when 
death separated them, Michelangelo, although 
he had passed his threescore years and ten, 
was to remain for sixteen years upon the 
earth. Yet these last years, though shad- 
owed by this sorrow, were surely better years 



94 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

because hallowed by the memory of this noble 
woman. 

Michelangelo had always been a poet ; he 
knew how to use words for colors as well as 
colors for words, and in this affection for 
Vittoria the poetic instinct burst into bloom 
in his old age ; the sonnets and madrigals 
that he addressed to her are full of spiritual 
beauty. This madrigal indicates the nature 
of their friendship : — 

" A man within a woman, nay, a god 
Speaks through her spoken word : 
I therefore, who have heard, 
Must suffer change, and shall be mine no more ; 
She lured me from the path I whilom trod. 
Borne from my former self by her away, 
I stand aloof, and mine own self deplore. 
Above all vain desire 
The beauty of her face doth lift my clay ; 
All lesser loveliness seems charnel mire. 

lady, who through fire 

And water leadest souls to joys eterne, 
Let me no more unto myself return. " * 

This, also, though not addressed, I like to 
believe was meant for her : — 

" Had I but earlier known that from the eyes 
Of the bright soul that fires me like the sun, 

1 might have drawn new strength my race to run, 
Burning, as burns the phoenix ere it dies, 

1 Symonds's Life, ii. p. 121. 



MICHELANGELO, THE ARTIST 95 

Even as the stag or lynx or leopard flies 

To seek his pleasure or his pain to shun, 

Each word, each smile of thine I would have won, 

Flying, when now sad age all flight denies. 

" Yet why complain ? For even now I find 
In that glad angel's face, so full of rest, 
Health and content, heart's ease and peace of mind. 
Perchance I might have been less simply blest, 
Finding her sooner, if 't is age alone 
That lets me soar with her to seek God's throne." x 

It is a pathetic picture, the venerable An- 
gelo bending by the couch of the dying Vit- 
toria to kiss her cold hand, and then going 
away to the loneliness made sweet by her dear 
memory. 

After her death his thoughts dwelt more 
and more on those themes of which they had 
communed ; the realities of the Christian faith 
became more vivid to him ; his fiery spirit 
was chastened by penitence and prayer, and 
he waited with eager expectation for the time 
of his release. In these last days his Dante 
was always with him. " Would to heaven," 
he said, " that I were such as he, even at the 
price of such a fate ! For his bitter exile and 
his virtue, I would exchange the most fortu- 
nate lot in the world. " " Toward the end," 

1 The Sonnets of Michael Angelo, translated by Symonds, 
Portland ed. p. 55. 



96 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

says Emerson, " there seems to have grown 
in him an invincible appetite for dying." To 
one who spoke to him sorrowfully of the end 
that must come soon he answered : " No, it is 
nothing ; for if life pleases us, death, being a 
work of the same Master, ought not to dis- 
please us." The resources of form and color 
fail him as he stands so near to the confines 
of the unseen and eternal, but he pours into 
deathless verse the utterance of a faith that 
could not fail : — 

" Now hath my life across a stormy sea, 

Like a frail bark reached that wide port where all 
Are bidden, ere the final reckoning fall 
Of good and evil for eternity. 

Now know I well how that fond phantasy 

Which made my soul the worshiper and thrall 
Of earthly art is vain ; how criminal 
Is that which all men seek unwillingly. 

Those amorous thoughts which were so lightly dressed, 
What are they when the double death is nigh ? 
The one I know for sure, the other dread. 

Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest 
My soul that turns to Eds great love on high, 
Whose arms to clasp me on the cross were spread." 

In such faith he died, February 18, 1564. 
If he had lived sixteen days longer he would 
have entered his ninetieth year. The Pope 
decreed that his grave should be made at 
Rome, but his kindred spirited the body away 



MICHELANGELO, THE ARTIST 97 

by night and bore it to his beloved Florence, 
where they buried him with honor, and after 
months of costly preparation made him a 
splendid memorial pageant in the church 
where his greatest sculptures stand ; all the 
artists of his native city brought offerings to 
enrich and beautify the catafalque erected to 
his memory, and orators and poets laid upon 
his tomb the garlands of their praise. 

A great soul and glorious was Michel- 
angelo Buonarotti, sculptor, painter, architect, 
poet ; not exempt from frailties ; possessing 
and deploring the defects of his qualities ; 
but a heroic lover of Beauty ; a loyal friend 
of Freedom and Justice ; a clear witness for 
Truth ; a humble servant of the Eternal One 
whose nature is light, whose law is liberty, 
whose name is love. 



Ill 

FICHTE, THE PHILOSOPHER 



L.ofC. 



The true self, thinks Fichte, is something 1 infinite. It needs 
a whole endless world of life to express itself in. Its moral law 
could n't be expressed in full on any one planet./ 1 Johann Gottlieb 
may be one of its prophets ; but the heavens could not contain 
its glory and its eternal business. No one of us ever finally gets 
at the true Reason which is the whole of him. Each one of us 
is a partial embodiment, an instrument of the moral law, and our 
very consciousness tells us that this law is the expression of an 
infinite world life. The true self is the will which is everywhere 
present in th ings. This will is, indeed, the vine, whereof our wills 
are the branches. — Josiah Boyce. 

According to Fichte there is a " Divine Idea " pervading the 
visible Universe, which visible Universe is indeed but its symbol 
and sensible manifestation, having in itself no means, or even true 
existence independent of it. To the mass of men this Divine 
Idea of the world lies hidden ; yet to discern it, to seize it, and to 
live wholly in it, is the condition of all genuine virtue, knowledge, 
freedom ; and the end, therefore, of all spiritual effort in every 
age. — Thomas Carlyle. 




JOHAXN GOTTLIEB FICHTE 



in 

FICHTE, THE PHILOSOPHER 

It is a long stride across the centuries from 
the death of Michelangelo in 1564, to the 
birth of Fichte in 1762. Many great things 
have happened during this period; the Re- 
naissance in Italy has spent its force ; its pro- 
phet was buried in the grave of the great 
Florentine sculptor, and a dismal decadence 
has followed both in art and in letters, while 
the national life of Italy has been practically 
extinguished in the Spanish- Austrian domina- 
tion. In the mean time, Germany, invigorated 
by the Reformation, has been rising in intel- 
ligence and power ; England, having lived 
through the dynasty of the Tudors, and har- 
vested the glories of the Elizabethan age, and 
bidden welcome and good riddance to the 
Stuarts, and rejoiced under the reign of Wil- 
liam and Mary and good Queen Anne, is now 
sitting down to endure the inglorious rule of 
the third of the Georges, while thirteen Eng- 



102 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

lish colonies, on this side of the sea, are be- 
ginning to feel themselves to be a people, and 
to lay the foundations of their national life. 

Dante the poet, and Michelangelo the art- 
ist, have answered to our call as witnesses of 
the light ; to-day we summon Fichte the philo- 
sopher. What is this philosophy of which he 
stands as a representative ? The word is used 
variously; the restricted signification which 
we here assign to it is fairly conveyed by 
the title of one of Fichte's principal books, 
" Wissenschaftslehre," — the science of know- 
ledge. Philosophy, as the term is now gen- 
erally used, is the endeavor to find out what 
we know and how we know it ; to investigate 
the powers and processes of the human mind ; 
to understand the significance of life. In 
another view it is an attempt to organize into 
general statements our knowledge of ourselves, 
and of the world in which we five, to unify 
the facts of our experience. We are all phi- 
losophers; we are all trying to find out the 
reason of things, the deeper meanings of life. 
The old farmer to whom Emerson had lent a 
volume of Plato was not making a very ex- 
travagant claim for himself when he said, on 
returning the book, " That old chap 's got some 



FICHTE, THE PHILOSOPHER 103 

o' my idees." His ideas they were, no doubt ; 
he had come by them honestly enough. 

Nobody has said this any better than Pro- 
fessor Eoyce : " You philosophize when you 
reflect critically on what you are actually do- 
ing in your world. What you are doing is, 
of course, in the first place, living. And life 
involves passions, faiths, doubts, and courage. 
The critical inquiry into what all these mean 
and imply is philosophy. We have our faith 
in life ; we want, reflectively, to estimate this 
faith. We feel ourselves in a world of law 
and of significance. Yet why we feel this 
homelike sense of the reality and worth of our 
world is a matter for criticism. Such a criti- 
cism of life, made elaborate and thorough 
going, is a philosophy." 1 

Much cheap satire is expended by crude 
minds upon this attempt to explore the deep 
things of life, but a great deal depends on our 
solution of the fundamental problems of exist- 
ence. It is true that men with absurd theories 
of life have lived honorably, and that multi- 
tudes whose theories are well enough are liv- 
ing basely ; whereupon some illogical minds 
rush to the conclusion that there is no connec- 

1 The Spirit of Philosophy, pp. 1, 2. 



104 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

tion between doctrine and practice, and that 
what you think matters not. The truth simply 
is that there is no necessary connection be- 
tween doctrine and practice ; a man's practice 
may disagree with his doctrine, but it gener- 
ally agrees ; and right thinking is more likely 
than wrong thinking to result in right living. 
To hold the contrary opinion is to repudiate 
the first principles of rationality. The philo- 
sopher who helps us to know ourselves and the 
significance of our own lives renders us, there- 
fore, the highest possible service. I trust that 
we shall be able to see, as we study the life 
of this German philosopher, how much brave 
and clear thinking has to do in shaping the 
lives of men and of nations. 

Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born in Upper 
Lusatia, a German province on the confines of 
Saxony, Brandenburg, and Bohemia, in the 
little village of Rammenau, May 19, 1762. 
This province contains a large Slavic element, 
but the Fichtes were originally Swedes ; the 
first of the name in those parts was a soldier 
in the army of Gustavus Adolphus, who, in 
one of the German campaigns of the great 
Swedish king, was wounded and left behind 
in Eammenau : the zealous Protestant family 



FICHTE, THE PHILOSOPHER 105 

that nursed him back to life gave him a home 
and their daughter in marriage. It was a 
sturdy and industrious line ; Christian Fichte, 
the philosopher's father, was a weaver of rib- 
bons and a man of substance and character. 
His first-born son was to him a wonder of 
wonders ; are not all children such to those 
who have eyes to see ? and the father gave 
much of his leisure to the child, teaching him 
to read, making him familiar with the Bible 
and the Catechism, and telling him long tales 
of his own wander-jahre, when, after the cus- 
tom of the country he had been compelled to 
be a journeyman indeed, traveling from town 
to town in search of employment. Thus it 
was that the child's mind was led out into the 
wide world, and set upon its quest of know- 
ledge. He seems to have been a very serious 
boy, not much given to the sports of child- 
hood ; he was happiest alone in the fields and 
the forests, thinking his own thoughts. 

An incident of his childhood illustrates 
the sensitive conscientiousness which, in after 
years, caused him often to be misunderstood. 
His father, as a reward of his industry, had 
bought him the Story of Siegfried, and it en- 
chanted him ; his studies were forgotten. For 



106 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

this he was sharply reproved, and in grief on 

account of his fault, he determined to destroy 
the book that it might no longer lead him into 
temptation. There was a bitter struggle in 
the child's heart as he stood by the brook, 
into which he was groins to fling: away his trea- 
sure, but conscience triumphed, and he flung 
it in. and then burst out crying. His father 
found him there weeping, and without wait- 
ing to find out why he had done it, punished 
him for throwing awav the book. It was not 
the last time that he suffered bitterly and un- 
justly for simple fidelity to his highest con- 
victions. 

The kindly Protestant pastor of the village 
soon got his eye on this exceptional child and 
gave him such help as he could. Finding 
him keenly attentive to the Sunday services, 
he asked him one day to tell him what he 
could remember of what he had heard the 
preceding Sunday. The child promptly gave 
him a good part of the discourse with the 
Scripture texts by which the argument had 
been confirmed. A miracle like that in a 
rustic community soon becomes village gos- 
sip ; a nobleman from abroad, visiting the 
lord of the manor, providentially expresses 



FICHTE, THE PHILOSOPHER 107 

his regret on Sunday afternoon that he had 
not heard the morning sermon. " Easy enough 
to supply that want/' they tell him. " There 
is a little boy in a cottage near by who heard 
it, and who can, no doubt, repeat it to you." 
" Send for him," says the baron ; and young 
Johann Gottlieb, aged seven, in a linen pina- 
fore, with a big nosegay in his hand for the 
lady of the house, comes in and recites, fluently 
and clearly, the morning discourse. " This 
child," says the baron, " is a marvel ; let him 
go home with me and he shall be set forward 
in the ways of learning." With many misgiv- 
ings the parents resign their boy to the keep- 
ing of the good Freiherr von Militz, who bears 
him away to his seat at Liebeneichen, not far 
from Miessen. It was a great and stately 
house in the midst of a gloomy forest coun- 
try : the boy was away from his mother ; no 
wonder he nearly died from homesickness. 
But the kind-hearted Freiherr found him a 
home in the family of a Protestant pastor in 
the little village of Niederau, near by, and the 
boy was happy again. It was a good home 
for him ; the minister had no children of his 
own, and he loved children, and little Johann 
Gottlieb was a child to love. The Herr Pas- 



108 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

tor was his preceptor ; through the elementary 
studies and the beginnings of Greek and Latin 
the lad went swiftly ; soon the pupil was be- 
yond his master's help, and in his twelfth year 
they sent him to the Schulpf orta, near Raum- 
berg. 

It was one of those mediaeval schools in 
which the paths of learning are made as thorny 
as possible ; teachers and pupils dwelt in cells ; 
once a week only the prisoners were let out 
to visit, under the eye of a detective, a play- 
ground in the vicinity. It is not related that 
they were permitted to play ; perhaps this was 
simply a method of torture. The fagging 
system was here in vogue, and the senior to 
whom Fichte was committed was a young 
brute to whom tyranny was a recreation. It 
was a stern discipline for the lonely youth ; 
there was nothing in the intellectual or the 
moral atmosphere of the school which was not 
depressing : " his sadness and tears," says a 
biographer, " exposed him to the derision of 
his school-fellows, and he, shy and retiring, 
shrunk within himself, restrained his tears, or 
suffered them to flow only in secret. Here, 
however, he learned the useful lesson of self- 
reliance, so well, though so bitterly, taught by 



FICHTE, THE PHILOSOPHER 109 

the absence of sympathy in those around us ; 
and from this time to the end of his life it 
was never forgotten." 

By some means a copy of " Robinson Cru- 
soe" found its way into the hands of this 
lonely lad, and he promptly resolved that he, 
too, would fly to some desert island — any- 
where, anywhere, out of that world. He will 
not sneak away ; he tells his senior that if the 
tyranny is not abated he is going, and gets 
scoffed at, of course; then he takes up his 
journey. The world is before him and the 
place of torment is behind him ; but he re- 
members the counsel of the good Herr Pastor 
never to do any serious thing without prayer, 
and he falls on his knees by the roadside. Now 
he thinks of his parents ; their well-imagined 
grief unnerves him ; he turns back to meet 
his pursuers, and is taken before the Rector of 
the school, to whom he tells the whole story so 
ingenuously that he is not only not punished 
but is taken by that functionary under his 
special protection. From this time forward 
the lines fall to him in less desolate places ; a 
new spirit seemed to have taken possession of 
the school ; petty tyrannies and small dishon- 
esties gave place to a manlier and more mag- 



110 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

nanimous temper. The school bears now, 
we are told, little of its ancient character ; 
who shall say how much the high-minded- 
ness of this boy had to do with its reforma- 
tion? 

In his eighteenth year he entered the Uni- 
versity of Jena ; here and in Leipsic he com- 
pleted his university course. But theology as 
then taught gave him little more than a fit 
of intellectual indigestion ; he must go deeper 
than these doctors dared to venture. The 
first cut de sac into which they led him was 
the old dilemma of predestination and free 
will ; with logic for his vehicle he came out, 
of course, a stout determinist. 

Shortly after he left the University and 
while he was still struggling in the philoso- 
phical bog, his kind benefactor died, and he 
was left penniless to make his own way in the 
world. Tutoring in families was the only avo- 
cation that opened to him : the living thus 
gained was precarious ; often he was on the 
verge of starvation. Four years of this fight- 
ing with adverse fate gave him chances enough 
to cultivate a practical philosophy, chances 
that he did not miss. Young men of brains 
and training sometimes find it hard in these 



FICHTE, THE PHILOSOPHER 111 

days to get employment ; few of them have 
passed through a struggle for life more severe 
than that in which Fichte was engaged during 
the four years after he left the University, 
and none of them more manfully. In the 
spring of 1788 his resources were at the low- 
est ebb ; for such service as he could render 
there seemed to be no demand. " It is the 
eve," says a biographer, " of his birthday in 
this same month of May. The pensive fancy 
figures him walking disconsolately about the 
environs of Leipsic, the balmy evening air 
blowing fresh upon his cheek ; birds of various 
note warbling softly their May night vespers 
or nestling, with placid murmurings, in the 
fields. He walks, as we said, disconsolately ; 
pondering with unavailing anxiety all the pro- 
jects which it has entered into his mind to 
devise, and finds them all alike hopeless. The 
world has cast him out, his country has re- 
fused him bread ; this approaching birthday, 
for aught he can tell, may be his last. Doubt- 
less people have died of starvation ; why not 
he? Full of bitter thoughts he returns, as 
it appears likely, for the last time, to his soli- 
tary and uncheerful dwelling. Can this be 
really a letter lying on the table? Yes, Fichte, 



112 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

even so : or say rather a hastily written note, 
a note from friend Weisse, the tax collector, 
requesting thee to step over to his house with- 
out delay. What can so peremptory a sum- 
mons signify ? It turns out that friend Weisse 
is authorized to make him the offer of a tutor- 
ship in a private family in Zurich." 

The place will not be open before Septem- 
ber, but by some means, perhaps by the same 
friend's assistance, he is enabled to subsist until 
August, and then, too poor to pay coach fare, 
but with a little money in his pocket to buy 
bread and shelter, he sets out on foot for 
Switzerland, a good three hundred miles as 
the crow flies, farther, doubtless, by such roads 
as he must travel. We do not know the route : 
possibly it took him through the picturesque 
Franconia hills, and old Bayreuth, and the 
more ancient Niirnberg ; we are only sure that, 
though often footsore and weary, he was heart- 
whole and happy, for honorable work and 
livelihood were awaiting him at his journey's 
end. 

The two years of his residence in Zurich 
were memorable years ; his work kept him too 
busy for much general study, but he preached 
now and then, with great acceptance, we are 



FICHTE, THE PHILOSOPHER 113 

told, and the friendships that he formed were 
of lasting influence upon his life. Into the 
family of a certain local notability named 
Rahn he had the entree ; Rahn's wife, who 
was now dead, had been the sister of the poet 
Klopstock, who had once lived here in Zurich 
and who, by the way, had been a pupil of that 
Purgatorio at Pforta where Fichte prepared 
for the University. In this family the distin- 
guished Lavater was a constant visitor ; this 
intense but erratic genius must have greatly 
stimulated the mind of this budding philoso- 
pher. The two years in Zurich were momen- 
tous to Fichte for many reasons, chief of which 
was his betrothal to Johanna Rahn, daughter 
of the house in which he had spent so many 
agreeable hours, and niece of the poet Klop- 
stock. It was a romantic and beautiful at- 
tachment ; the love-letters, which began while 
he was still in Zurich, and which continued 
through the years of separation, are utterances 
of ardent affection and high philosophy and 
strenuous purpose. In the spring of 1790 his 
engagement as tutor is at an end and he turns 
his face homeward, traveling again most of 
the way on foot, but bearing with him some 
strong testimonials by means of which he 



114 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

hopes to find employment. He goes to Stutt- 
gart and finds nothing ; to Weimar with equal 
success : Herder is sick and Goethe is in Italy 
and Schiller is too busy to see callers. So 
back he goes to Leipsic and waits. There is 
a little teaching to do, and there is a project 
of a monthly magazine, with high aims, which 
never materializes, and there is strenuous en- 
deavor, which is wholly futile, to get a little 
money by his pen. How he manages to keep 
soul and body together we are not clear ; but 
something happens to him in the course of the 
winter which is even more important than 
keeping body and soul together ; it is the dis- 
covery of the truth which establishes at once 
and forever his intellectual integrity ; which 
shows him the significance of life, and makes 
his vocation clear as the daylight. That dis- 
covery comes to him through reading the 
" critical philosophy " of Immanuel Kant. 
His beliefs, until now, had been in confusion ; 
his theories had been at war with his convic- 
tions. So writes he to his Johanna, in the 
winter of 1790 : — 

" A circumstance which seemed dependent 
on mere chance led me to give myself up to 
the study of the Kantian philosophy, — a phi- 



FICHTE, THE PHILOSOPHER 115 

losophy that restrains the imagination (which, 
in my case, was always too powerful), gives 
reason the dominion, and raises the soul to 
an elevation above earthly concerns. I have 
accepted a new and nobler morality ; and, in- 
stead of occupying myself with outward things, 
I am employed more exclusively with my own 
being. This has given me a peace such as I 
have never before experienced, for amid un- 
certain worldly prospects I have spent my hap- 
piest days. I propose to devote some years 
of my life to this philosophy, and all that I 
write, at least for some time to come, shall 
have reference to it. It is difficult, beyond 
conception, and stands greatly in need of 
simplification. The principles, indeed, are 
hard speculations, having no direct bearing on 
human life, but their consequences are ex- 
tremely important to an age whose morality 
is corrupted at the very fountain ; and to set 
these consequences before the world in a clear 
light would, I believe, be doing it good ser- 
vice. ... I am now thoroughly convinced 
that the human will is free, and that to be 
happy is not the purpose of our being, but to 
deserve happiness." 1 

1 Popular Works of Fichte, edited by Wm. Smith, i. 40. 



116 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

So Fichte has found his vocation. It will 
be months and years before he will be able to 
apply himself to it, but he knows what is his 
high calling ; his mind has found the centre 
of light, and his heart is at rest in the assur- 
ance of a pure love ; what more can any man 
covet ? All else is but accident or appendage. 

Need enough is there of this calm philo- 
sophy, for the hosts of adverse circumstance 
are not yet put to rout. There is great hope 
in the spring of 1791 that he may be able to 
claim his Johanna and set up his home, but 
that is dashed to the ground ; then, in far-off 
Warsaw work is offered and he trudges thither 
to find that the situation is impossible. But 
Konigsberg is not far away ; before he turns 
homeward he must go thither and see the great 
philosopher who has led him into the light. 

Conceive the ardent neophyte seeking out 
the little, fussy old bachelor philosopher in his 
out-of-the-way home in Konigsberg. Doubt- 
less, in the outward shape and life of the great 
man there may have been disillusion for Fichte. 
" I do not believe," says Heine, " that the 
great cathedral clock [of Konigsberg] accom- 
plished its day's work in a less passionate or 
more regular way than its countryman, Im- 



FICHTE, THE PHILOSOPHER 117 

manuel Kant. Rising from bed, coffee-drink- 
ing, eating, walking, everything had its fixed 
time ; and the neighbors knew that it must be 
exactly half past four when they saw Professor 
Kant in his gray coat, with cane in his hand, 
move toward the little lime-tree avenue which 
is named after him 6 The Philosopher's Walk.' 
Eight times he walked up and down that walk 
at every season of the year, and when the 
weather was bad or the gray clouds threatened 
rain, his servant, old Lampe, was seen anxiously 
following him with a large umbrella under his 
arm, like an image of Providence." 

One can easily guess that the reception 
given to the young Fichte by this preoccu- 
pied philosopher was not over-cordial ; doubt- 
less Kant had too many interruptions. But 
Fichte greatly wishes to secure between him- 
self and his great master what he calls a " free 
scientific confidence," so he sits down in Ko- 
nigsberg and writes his first considerable trea- 
tise, " The Critique of all Revelation." With 
this key he will unlock the heart of Kant. " It 
is perhaps one of the most touching and in- 
structive passages of literary history," says 
William Smith, "to find a young man at a 
distance from his own country, without a 



118 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

friend, without even the means of personal 
subsistence, and sustained only by an ardent 
and indomitable love of truth, devoting him- 
self with intense application to the produc- 
tion of a systematic work on one of the deep- 
est subjects of philosophic thought, that he 
might thereby attain the friendship and con- 
fidence of one whom he regarded as the great- 
est of living men." ' The philosopher looks 
it over and cautiously commends it, but the 
performance does not greatly forward the de- 
sired " free scientific confidence." Mean- 
while Fichte's slender resources are com- 
pletely exhausted, and he is far from home. 
But the sun never sets on a resolute spirit; 
now when his need is deepest, an invitation 
comes from Dantzic, still farther north, upon 
the shores of the Baltic, and he hastens to 
find a congenial home as private tutor in the 
family of Count von Krokow. Now a pub- 
lisher is found for " The Critique of all Re- 
velation," and the book, published, by an ac- 
cident, anonymously, is seized upon by the 
critics as undoubtedly a publication of the 
redoubtable Kant himself. Kant quickly sets 
that right and proclaims the true author ; so 

1 Fichte's Popular Works, ii. 49, 60. 



FICHTE, THE PHILOSOPHER 119 

here at once is recognition and renown. The 
critics cannot take it back ; they have said 
it ; it is a book that Kant may, nay — must 
have written ; this writer, then, is worthy to 
rank with the greatest philosopher of modern 
history. The door which has hitherto been 
shut and bolted in Fichte's face is now at least 
ajar ; the steady pressure of dauntless indus- 
try will force it open. 

In the summer of 1793, and in the thirty- 
second year of his life, he is able to return to 
Zurich and take into his home the woman who 
has waited for him so loyally. With the small 
dowry she brings him and his own modest 
earnings he is free of the world ; he can go 
on with his study unhindered. 

He tarries here in Zurich for a year, study- 
ing and writing ; now comes an invitation 
from royalty to undertake the education of 
the Prince of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a court 
position with distinction a plenty, and pud- 
ding galore, but he will none of it. " I desire 
nothing," he says, " but leisure to execute my 
plan ; then fortune may do with me what it 
will." Next arrives an invitation from Jena 
to become a supernumerary Professor of Phi- 
losophy there, and that is another story. At 



120 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

once he accepts it, and is soon at work in the 
most illustrious of all the seats of learning in 
Germany. Weimar, the capital and court of 
the Grand Duke Charles Augustus, is only a 
dozen miles away, and the University is the 
Grand Duke's pride ; he has gathered about 
him such a galaxy of genius as has not more 
than once or twice been grouped upon the 
planet — by Pericles, perhaps, at Athens, and 
by Lorenzo the Magnificent at Florence. At 
this court and in this University, now, be- 
tween the years 1790 and 1810, at the zenith of 
its fame, men like Wieland, Reinhold, Goethe, 
Schiller, Schlegel, Oken, Hegel are gathered ; 
into this august company Johann Gottlieb 
Fichte enters May 18, 1794. So great are the 
expectations concerning him that the largest 
hall in Jena is crowded to the roof on his 
first appearance as a lecturer, and numbers 
are turned away. The impression which he 
made, says one reporter, exceeded all expecta- 
tion. " His singular and commanding address, 
his fervid and impetuous eloquence, the pro- 
foundness and rich profusion of his thoughts, 
poured forth in the most convincing sequence 
and fashioned with a wondrous precision, 
astonished and delighted his hearers. His 



FICHTE, THE PHILOSOPHER 121 

triumph was complete; he left the hall the 
most popular professor of the greatest Uni- 
versity in Germany." 

But university popularity, as other pro- 
fessors have found, is a fitful gust ; no man 
can tell which way it will blow to-morrow. In 
no other German University was the lawless- 
ness — sometimes called Freiheit — of student 
life more flagrant than in Jena; mobs of 
Burschen frequently broke into houses of 
professors and other residents and robbed the 
wine-cellars to furnish forth their own ca- 
rousals ; neither the dignity of man nor the 
helplessness of woman was any protection 
against their brutalities. To the lofty manli- 
ness of Fichte such a state of things was in- 
tolerable, and he determined to appeal to the 
students themselves to put away these bar- 
barities. His lectures on Academical Moral- 
ity, simply by lifting up a higher ideal, pro- 
duced a marked effect ; the students responded 
to the appeal and offered to abolish their 
unions and abandon their atrocities, but the 
authorities of the University, apparently jeal- 
ous of the fame of Fichte, fumbled with the 
business, and the result was that one of the 
three students' unions refused to lay down its 



122 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

weapons of war, and remained as a disturbing 
element. But Fichte determined to continue 
his lectures, and he desired to give them at an 
hour not occupied by other instruction, that 
all the students might attend. Would Sunday 
morning do ? That question greatly agitated 
the University authorities. Finally, Professor 
Schutz, who seems to have been a Daniel come 
to judgment, ventured the query : " If plays 
are permitted on Sunday, why not moral lec- 
tures ? " and that seems to have settled it. 

But there are worse foes to fight than 
rowdy students ; intolerant conservatism brings 
first the charge that he is attempting to 
undermine Christianity and substitute there- 
for the worship of reason, and when that 
charge is exploded, returns to the attack with 
the accusation of atheism. The absurdity of 
it ! It is probably safe to say that there is 
no man in Germany whose faith in God is so 
strong as that of Johann Gottlieb Fichte. You 
might almost say that he believes in nothing 
else; it might plausibly be made a charge 
against his philosophy that it leaves no ade- 
quate room in the universe for other personali- 
ties. On this Fichte will neither explain nor 
apologize ; he tells the University authorities 



FICHTE, THE PHILOSOPHER 123 

that they must either acquit him absolutely or 
accept his resignation, and his peremptory 
tone, rather than any belief in the justice of 
the accusation, provokes them to take him at 
his word and let him go. 

Once more he is adrift, but the port is near. 
King Frederick William III., grand-nephew 
of Frederick the Great, and great grand-uncle 
of the present Kaiser, is told of Fichte's mis- 
hap at Jena, and bids him welcome to Berlin ; 
he is not afraid of the heresy : " Mir that 
das nichts ! " he laughs. So Fichte once 
more strikes his tent and, in July, 1799, 
pitches it in the Prussian capital, thencefor- 
ward to be his home save for some temporary 
residence at the University of Erlangen in 
Bavaria. Poverty was still his constant com- 
panion ; some small revenue may have come 
from the books he printed, and from courses 
of private lectures, but the housekeeping must 
have been of a very simple sort ; the living 
was the plainest but the thinking was the 
highest. Here he completed and published, 
in 1799, his book on u The Vocation of Man," 
— in the spirit that animates it one of the 
noblest books of all literature. Here, also, in 
the years that immediately follow, are made 



124 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

ready for the press the books by which he will 
be longest remembered, his lectures on " The 
Vocation of the Scholar," and " The Nature 
of the Scholar," and his lectures on " The 
Way to the Blessed Life, or the Doctrine of 
Religion." Of these, the substance of the 
first two was given to the students of Jena. 
Here was gathered about him a circle of 
brilliant companions, — Friedrich and Wil- 
helm Schlegel, Tieck, Woltmann, Kotzebue, 
Reichhardt, Bernhardt, Jean Paul Friedrich 
Richter. 

It may be well to pause here for a word 
upon the contribution which Fichte has made 
to the science of knowledge and upon the 
nature of his teaching. 

His system of thought is sometimes de- 
scribed as subjective idealism; it is better 
named, as Professor Royce suggests, ethical 
idealism, for the heart and soul of it is in the 
recognition of human freedom. " Vocation " 
is Fichte's great word — " The Vocation of 
the Scholar," " The Vocation of Man," are 
phrases in his view of supreme significance. 
Man is not the creature of circumstance, his 
precise business in the world is to control 



FICHTE, THE PHILOSOPHER 125 

and command circumstances, to impress his 
will upon them. His will is, indeed, for him, 
the fundamental reality ; for it is only by 
his effort to express himself that he becomes 
aware of his own existence and of existences 
other than himself. " The deepest truth, then," 
— this is Professor Royce's exposition, — 
" is a practical truth. I need something 
not myself, in order to be active, that is, to 
exist. My very existence is practical ; it is 
self-assertion. I exist, so to speak, by hurling 
the fact of my existence at another than my- 
self. I limit myself thus, by a foreign, some- 
what opaque external, my own opposite ; but 
my limitation is the free choice of my own 
self. By thus limiting myself, I give myself 
something to do, and thus win my own very 
existence. Yet this opposition, upon which 
my life is based, is an opposition within my 
deepest nature. I have a foreign world as 
the theatre of my activity ; I exist only to 
conquer and to win that apparently foreign 
world to myself ; I must come to possess it ; 
I must prove that it is mine. In the process 
of thus asserting a foreign world, and then 
actively identifying it as not foreign and ex- 
ternal, but as our own, our life itself consists. 



126 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

This is what is meant by work, by love, by 
duty." 1 

As a consistent idealist Fichte, of course, 
denies that the external world has any in- 
dependent existence or validity; each of us 
makes his own world. There are no realities 
of knowledge except God and myself, and 
the self in me is but a manifestation of God. 
Outside of me there is a limit in resisting 
which I come to myself ; but the impulse 
which sends me out toward this limit and 
thus brings me to self-consciousness is " God 
working in me, to will and to work of his 
good pleasure." " This universe of selves " 
— I am again leaning on Professor Royce — 
"constitutes the life and embodiment of the 
one true and infinite Reason, God's will, 
which, itself supreme and far above the level 
of our finite personality, uses even our con- 
scious lives and wills as part of its own 
life. This doctrine Fichte himself, in one of 
his later works (' The Way to the Blessed 
Life '), identifies with the teaching of the 
Fourth Gospel. According to this view, you 
see, God, in so far as He reveals himself, is 
indeed the vine, and we, in so far as we truly 

1 The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 158. 



FICHTE, THE PHILOSOPHER 127 

live, are the sap-laden and fruitful branches. 
The only real world is the world of conscious 
activity, and so of spiritual relationships, of 
society, of serious business, of friendship, of 
love, of law, of rational existence, — in a 
word, of work ; as for matter, that is the 
mere show-stuff that is needed to embody, to 
express, to give form, stability, outline, as it 
were, to our moral work." ' 

Let me borrow from Professor Everett one 
more word of interpretation : — 

" The world is the projection of human 
spirits and represents the stage which they 
have reached. God is practically recognized 
as an ideal ; and may thus be seen in absolute 
beauty and completeness. One can doubt His 
reality and His perfection no more than he 
can doubt his own being. At the same time 
it is affirmed, from the beginning, that it is by 
the Divine life within, that the spirit presses 
on toward the Divine Ideal. In regard to this 
impulse within us, there can be as little doubt 
as in regard to the ideal toward which it points. 
God is thus recognized as the most certain of 
realities. The ideal to which the soul aspires 
is infinite. So soon as one form has been 

1 The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 153. 



12S WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

attained, another and higher takes its place. 
In the fact of its impulse to attain to this 
ideal, the spirit finds the pledge of its own 
immortality." 1 

It is impossible to present in this curt fash- 
ion any adequate account of the philosophy of 
Fiehte. It is more to our purpose to grasp 
the great ideas which controlled his teaching 
and the great ends of which he never lost 
sight. However defective may have been his 
metaphysics, one commanding truth held pos- 
session of the man and reverberates through 
all his utterances. To say that he believed in 
God would be quite misrepresenting his men- 
: God was to him the most certain 
fact of knowledge. Matthew Arnold's two 
great phrases. — " that stream of tendency by 
which all things strive to fufill the law of their 
being." and ••' the Power not ourselves that 
makes for righteousness." — would both have 
fined his thoughts fairlv well : though he would 
hardly, perhaps, have been willing to say that 
the Power is not ourselves : rather would he 
have held that it is one with our real selves, 
and finds its highest revelation through us. 

1 Fiehte's Science of Knowledge — A Critical Exposition, 



FICHTE, THE PHILOSOPHER 129 

The one central, supreme, all-comprehend- 
ing fact of our individual lives, of the life of 
the world, in Fichte's doctrine, is God. The 
Divine Idea is striving after fulfillment in us 
as individuals, in the societies which we form, 
in the states of which we are citizens. Yet 
we are free, and it is for us to work out our 
own salvation by discerning the Divine Idea, 
and conforming our own purposes to it. Ten- 
nyson's prayer paraphrases his thought : — 

" Our wills are ours, we know not how ; 
Our wills are ours to make them thine." 

The divine lineaments are impressed on every 
human life ; the divine purpose is seeking ex- 
pression in every human character : we must 
find it in ourselves and lay hold upon it and 
rejoice in it, and fight against everything in 
ourselves or in the world about us that hinders 
its development. We must find it in others, 
and make them apprehend it, and stimulate 
and strengthen it in every possible way. 

This sublime truth of the immanent God is 
something more than a mystical speculation 
with Fichte : he seeks to bring it home to 
every man's business and bosom, to make it 
the ruling idea of every individual and of 
every social organization. Those untamed 



130 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

Burschen of Jena — he drives this truth into 
their heads with irresistible logic. It is not 
in the hortatory fashion ; he does not preach ; 
he expounds and elucidates and enforces ; he 
makes them see that it must be so. There 
is passionate intensity behind it all ; there is 
tremendous conviction ; it is a man that is 
speaking and not a mere reasoning machine ; 
but, after all, the method is scientific ; it is not 
the speaker who claims their assent but the 
truth spoken. There is one thing for them 
to do, one only, for every one of them — to 
discern the Divine Idea struggling for utter- 
ance in their own lives and live by it ; nothing 
else is life. In all these great lectures on the 
Nature and Vocation of the Scholar, and in 
the book on " The Way to the Blessed Life," 
the same note is always resounding. Phillips 
Brooks used to say that he had but one ser- 
mon, and Fichte might have said the same 
thing : indeed, Fichte's sermon and Brooks's 
were much the same sermon. 

But the quiet life of the cloister and the 
lecture room at Berlin and Erlangen are rudely 
interrupted. Napoleon is marching over Eu- 
rope ; most of the German states have fallen 
before him ; Prussia, which has resisted to 



FICHTE, THE PHILOSOPHER 131 

the last, is now threatened by advancing 
hosts. Fichte begs of the King permission 
to go out with the army against the foe ; he 
cannot fight, but he conceives that as patri- 
otic orator he might kindle the souls of his 
countrymen. He laments, as he says, " that 
his age has denied him the privilege accorded 
to ^schylus and Cervantes, to make good 
his words by manly deeds. . . . But since he 
may only speak he would speak fire and sword. 
Nor would he do this securely and away from 
all danger." Philosophy is not, you see, with 
Fichte, a mere abstraction. The Divine Idea, 
as he incarnates it, includes the might of the 
Lord of Sabaoth. The rapid progress of the 
war forbade, however, the fulfillment of his 
chivalric hope ; the battle of Jena was fatal 
to the Prussians ; Napoleon entered Berlin, 
and Fichte, disdaining to live in his own 
home at the mercy of the invader, fled to 
Konigsberg and thence to Copenhagen, re- 
maining until the humiliating peace of Tilsit 
permitted him to return to a nation robbed of 
much of its territory and trampled beneath 
the heel of the conqueror. 

But this was the hour of the rebirth of the 
nation. The Teutonic spirit could not endure 



132 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

this shame. These losses must be retrieved 
and this dishonor must be wiped out. But 
how and by whose hands? That was the 
burning question. And the answer — the 
answer that the people heard, that convinced 
their understanding, that guided their pur- 
pose, that kindled in their souls a quenchless 
resolution, was spoken most clearly by Johann 
Gottlieb Fichte. Other hearts burned with 
the same enthusiasm, other lips glowed with 
a kindred message, but the testimony seems 
to be clear that no voice was so influential as 
his in the crisis of the nation. It was not an 
economist, nor a jurist, nor a diplomatist, nor 
a soldier, who pointed out to Prussia the only 
way of life ; it was this humble scholar and 
teacher, this poor man of books and ideas, 
who proved that he had understanding of the 
times and could show his countrymen what 
they ought to do. His Lectures to the Ger- 
man People — " Reden an Deutschen " — de- 
livered at this juncture, are one of the great 
events of German history — more significant, 
more decisive of national destiny, perhaps, 
than any battle ever won by German arms. 
What was the burden of this prophecy ? Sim- 
ply the old truth that he has been telling so 



FICHTE, THE PHILOSOPHER 133 

diligently in his lectures on the Vocation of 
the Scholar and the Vocation of the Man — 
this people must know God's will and do it. 
It was their manhood that needed invigora- 
tion ; they must be better men ; they must 
have clearer minds and stronger wills, and a 
deeper sense of their vocation. Not to mili- 
tary skill and prowess, not even to an in- 
creased economic efficiency did he direct their 
thoughts, but to the things that are unseen 
and eternal ; salvation must come to the na- 
tion through the recognition of spiritual 
aims, through the culture of moral dignity, 
and through fidelity to the great ideals of 
freedom and character. 

In one passage of lofty eloquence he sum- 
mons the spirits of their ancestors, who, in the 
primeval forests, " stemmed with their own 
bodies the tide of Roman domination over 
the world, who vindicated with their own 
blood the independence of those mountains, 
plains, and streams which you have suffered to 
fall a prey to the stranger. They call to you, 
' Be ye our defenders ! hand down our mem- 
ory to future ages, honorable and spotless as 
it has come down to you. Hitherto our strug- 
gle has been deemed noble, great, and wise ; 



134 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

we have been looked upon as the consecrated 
and inspired ones of a Divine World Plan. 
Should our race perish with you, then will our 
honor be changed into dishonor, our wisdom 
into folly. For if Germany were ever to be 
subdued to the Empire, then were it better 
to have fallen before the elder Romans than 
their modern descendants. We withstood 
those and triumphed ; these have scattered you 
like chaff before them. But as matters now 
are with you, seek not to conquer with bodily 
weapons, but stand firm and erect before them 
in spiritual dignity. Yours is the greater des- 
tiny, — to found an empire of mind and rea- 
son ; to destroy the dominion of rude physical 
power as the ruler of the world. Do this, and 
you shall be worthy of your descent from us." 

Are you listening, Kaiser Wilhelm II., War 
Lord of Germany ? 

" All ages " — the orator goes on — " all 
the wise and good who have ever breathed 
the air of this world of ours — all their 
thoughts and aspirations toward a higher good 
mingle with these voices and encompass you 
about and raise supplicating hands toward 
you. Providence itself, if we may venture so 
to speak, and the Divine Plan in the creation 



FICHTE, THE PHILOSOPHER 135 

of the human race, which indeed only exists 
that it may be understood of men and by men 
be wrought out into reality, plead with you to 
save their honor and existence." * 

It was not a prudent thing for Fichte thus 
to speak. Berlin was still occupied by French 
troops, tarrying here until the heavy indem- 
nity could be raised and paid ; the trumpets 
of their battalions marching by often drowned 
his voice while he was speaking, and spies 
mingled with his audiences, but he faltered 
not. " The good that I seek," he said, " is 
the awakening and elevation of the people, 
against which my personal danger is not to be 
reckoned, but for which it may rather be most 
advantageously incurred. My family and my 
son shall not want the support of the nation — 
the least of the advantages of having a martyr 
for their father. This is the best choice. I 
could not devote my life to a better end." 2 

Not in vain were these lofty appeals to the 
heart of the German nation. Nor was it a 
mere emotional awakening. The first rem- 
edy for their miseries that suggested itself was 
the education of the people. In these very 

1 Fichte's Popular Works, i. 152-156. 
a Fichte's Popular Works, i. 150. 



136 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

addresses Fichte first proposed and clearly 
outlined that system of popular education 
which is the chief element of German power 
and prosperity to-day. One of the first things 
determined on was the establishment of a new 
university based on more modern ideas, and 
Fichte was requested to draft a plan for it. 
His ideas were not all accepted ; they contem- 
plated a kind of organic unity in the work of 
the university, and a degree of devotion to the 
culture of character as the main purpose of 
academic instruction for which his contempo- 
raries were hardly ready ; but when the uni- 
versity was organized by the suffrages of his 
fellow professors, — such men as Wolff, Hum- 
boldt, De Wette, Schleiermacher, Neander,and 
Savigny, — he was unanimously elected the 
first rector. The greatest university of Europe 
owns him to-day as chief among its founders 
and its first official head. In this position he 
gave himself, with dauntless enthusiasm, to 
the ethical and spiritual culture of the student 
body, — to the creation among them of stan- 
dards of honor and manliness before which the 
barbarities of student life should disappear. 1 

1 William Smith, in his Memoir, makes Fichte the first 
rector ; R. Adamson, in his Fichte, gives that honor to 



FICHTE, THE PHILOSOPHER 137 

Under such inspiring influences Prussia 
is roused, quickened, regenerated ; Stein is 
the statesman under whom the renovation is 
well begun. Great social reforms are set in 
motion, serfdom is abolished, schools are 
opened, a new heart and a new purpose have 
taken possession of the nation ; and when, on 
Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, the hour 
strikes for the deliverance of the people, they 
rise as one man ; there is an energy of patri- 
otic resolve against which no force can stand. 

It is in the beginning of this campaign that 
the students of the new university gather one 
day to hear Professor Fichte speak on Duty. 
Great is the throng, and more or less turbu- 
lent and flippant, but there is a hush when 
the Herr Professor stands up, for all are full 
of expectation. " He lectures," says an en- 
thusiastic reporter who was there, " with his 
usual dignity and calmness, rising at intervals 
into fiery bursts of eloquence, but governed 
always by a wondrous tact of logic such as 
few could equal. From this topic of duty in 
the abstract he leads his audience to the pre- 

Schmalz. It is possible that Fichte acted as rector of the 
earlier and later organization, and that Schmalz was placed 
at its head when it was more formally organized. 



138 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

sent state of national affairs. On them he 
glows and expands with animation, the roll- 
ing of drums without frequently drowning 
his voice but inspiring him with fresh cour- 
age to proceed. He paints the desolation of 
the country, the withering hideousness of 
usurpation ; he swells with a sublime indigna- 
tion against oppressors, and passionately en- 
forces it as the duty of every one before him 
to consecrate his individual strength and fac- 
ulty to the rescue of his native land. g Gen- 
tlemen/ he exclaims finally, 'this course of 
lectures will be suspended till the end of the 
campaign. We will resume them in a free 
country or die in the attempt to establish our 
liberties.' The hall reverberates with loud 
responsive shoutings ; the rolling of the out- 
ward drums is answered by the clapping of 
innumerable hands and the stampings of a 
thousand feet ; every German heart there 
present is moved to resolution and pants for 
conquest or for martyrdom. Fichte descends 
from his place, passes through the crowd, and 
places himself in the ranks of a corps of vol- 
unteers then departing for the army." 

The campaign, as you all know, ended with 
the destruction of Napoleon and the rehabili- 



FICHTE, THE PHILOSOPHER 139 

tation of Prussia ; it was the first resolute and 
mighty step onward in a national career which 
has made Prussia the arbiter of the destinies 
of Germany, which has united the German 
people, and placed upon the head of the suc- 
cessor of Fichte's king the crown of a mighty 
empire. 

It was not for Fichte to render any impor- 
tant service in the army, but he had done better 
than that ; more than almost any man in Ger- 
many he had helped to make the army pos- 
sible, and to fill it with the faith that made 
it victorious. His devoted wife, nursing the 
sick soldiers in the hospital that winter, was 
smitten with a malignant fever; her husband 
nursed her through it, only leaving her side 
long enough to meet his class in the evening. 
One night he went to his work, hardly hoping 
to find her alive on his return ; he came back 
to find the fever broken, and in his joy stooped 
to kiss her, thus drawing in the poisoned 
breath that prostrated him with the same 
deadly malady. For eleven days he lingered, 
most of the time under the shadow. In one 
of his lucid intervals they told him of Blu- 
cher's passage of the Rhine and of the final 
expulsion of the French army from German 



140 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

soil. One moment of exultation, then the de- 
lirium returned and he was fighting in the 
ranks and shouting with the victors. Rest 
came to him, at last, January 27, 1814, in the 
fifty-second year of his age, while his eye was 
not yet dim nor his natural force abated. 

What was this man ? Let him answer for 
himself : "To this am I called, — to bear wit- 
ness to the Truth : my life, my fortunes are 
of little moment ; the results of my life are of 
infinite moment. I am a Priest of Truth : I 
am in her pay ; I have bound myself to do all 
things, to venture all things, to suffer all things 
for her. If I should be hated and persecuted 
for her sake, if I should even meet death in 
her service, what wonderful thing is it I shall 
have done, — what but that which I clearly 
ought to do." * 

If we might speak for him we would say 
that he came to, open men's eyes to the mean- 
ing of the life they are living, to help them to 
discern and rejoice in their inheritance as the 
sons of God. More comprehensive thinkers, 
more careful analysts of the soul there may 
have been among German philosophers, but 
no truer witness, no manlier man. " We state 

1 Fichte's Popular Works, i. 224. 



FICHTE, THE PHILOSOPHER 141 

Fichte's character," says Carlyle, "as it is 
known and admitted by men of all parties 
among the Germans, when we say that so 
robust an intellect, a soul so calm, so lofty, 
massive, and immovable has not mingled in 
philosophical discussion since the time of 
Luther. . . . The man rises before us, amid 
contradiction and debate, like a granite moun- 
tain amid clouds and wind. . . . Fichte's opin- 
ions may be true or false, but his character, 
as a thinker, can be slightly valued only by 
such as know it all ; and as a man, approved 
by action and suffering, in his life and in his 
death, he ranks with a class of men who were 
common only in better ages than ours." * 

In a churchyard, just inside the Oranien- 
burg-Thor, in Berlin, is an obelisk reared to 
his memory with this inscription : — 

THE TEACHERS SHALL SHINE 

AS THE BRIGHTNESS OF THE FIRMAMENT; 

AND THEY THAT TURN MANY TO RIGHTEOUSNESS 

AS THE STARS FOREVER AND EVER. 

1 State of German Literature. 



IV 



VICTOR HUGO, THE MAN OF 
LETTERS 



Yes, a society that admits misery, a humanity that admits war, 
seems to me an inferior society and a debased humanity ; it is a 
higher society and a more elevated humanity at which I am aim- 
ing-, — a society without kings, a humanity without barriers. 

I want to universalize property, not to abolish it ; I would sup- 
press parasitism ; I want to see every man a proprietor and no 
man a master. This is my idea of true social economy. The goal 
may be far distant, but is that a reason for not striving to advance 
toward it ? 

Letter to Larnartine. 

Have faith, then ; and let us realize our equality as citizens, our 
fraternity as men, our liberty in intellectual power. Let us love 
not only those who love us, but those who love us not. Let 
us learn to wish to benefit all men. Then everything will be 
changed; truth will reveal itself, the beautiful will arise, the 
supreme law will be fulfilled, and the world shall enter upon a 
perpetual fete day. I say, therefore, have faith. 

Speech to WorkingmerCs Congress. 




VICTOR HUGO 



IV 



VICTOR HUGO, THE MAN OF 
LETTERS 

" This century of ours was but two years 
old, the Sparta of the Republic was giving 
place to the Rome of the Empire, and Bona- 
parte the First Consul was developing into 
Napoleon the Emperor, when, at Besan£on, 
there came into the world a child of mingled 
Breton and Lorraine blood, who was colorless, 
sightless, voiceless, and so poor a weakling 
that all despaired of him except his mother. 
. . . That child, whose name Life appeared 
to be erasing from its book, and whose short 
day of existence seemed destined to pass into 
night with never a morrow — that child am 
I." 1 

With this bit of autobiography Victor 
Hugo stands before us. When he was born 
Fichte the philosopher had just made his home 
in Berlin, and had twelve years more of heroic 

1 Quoted in Marzials's Life, p. 13. 



146 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

work to do ; Napoleon the First, as he tells 
us, was just setting out on that career of 
usurpation and conquest which was hastening 
to its close when Fichte lay dying. 

Besangon is in the east of France, a little 
north of the railway route by which travelers 
are wont to cross the Jura from Pontarlier to 
Berne ; it is an old Roman city — in Csesar's 
day known as Vesontio — and it was the capi- 
tal of the tribe of the Seguani, of whose ex- 
ploits that warlike historian tells us. Exten- 
sive Roman ruins are visible there to-day — 
a triumphal arch, a theatre, and an amphithe- 
atre. Not much place, however, had these 
august surroundings in the life of this infant ; 
for Besancon was for his household a camp 
rather than a home. His father, Joseph Leo- 
pold Sigisbert Hugo, was an officer of the 
French army, and at the time of Victor's 
birth was about twenty-nine years old. He 
had apparently volunteered in the army of 
the Revolution ; promotions were rapid in that 
time ; in 1793 he was a captain in the Revolu- 
tionary forces, and was devoting his energies 
to the suppression of that revolt of the roy- 
alists in La Vendee, which Victor Hugo has 
so vividly pictured in " Ninety-Three," and 



VICTOR HUGO, THE MAN OF LETTERS 147 

Balzac in " The Chouans." Doubtless Sigis- 
bert Hugo was a good enough Republican, 
and though he afterward followed the for- 
tunes of Napoleon, it was because military 
passion was stronger in him than political 
conviction. The poet's mother was the daugh- 
ter of a royalist of La Vendee ; doubtless the 
acquaintance was made while Sigisbert Hugo 
was soldiering in that province ; the fierce 
antipathy of the Reds and the Blues could 
not keep the young people apart, and after 
Hugo returned to Paris and was established 
in the war office, the maiden's father con- 
ducted her thither and they were married, in 
1796. But now, with Napoleon at the head 
of the army, a soldier's life was not likely 
to be a stationary one, and Sigisbert Hugo 
with his wife and babes was constantly on the 
march. This was what brought him, at the 
head of his battalion, to Besangon in February, 
1802, where his third son, Victor Marie, was 
born. The French fashion of giving girls' 
names to boys seems to have been in vogue 
in that neighborhood. Some of Mr. Stanley 
Weyman's boys are represented as rebelling 
against it ; the difficulty is that long before 
the bearer of the name has a chance to rebel 



148 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

the mischief is past mending. Little Victor 
Marie Hugo was consulted neither about 
name nor local habitation ; puny as he was, 
before he was six weeks old he must fall in 
and march, — an infant in arms, indeed, — 
first to Marseilles and then to Corsica and 
Elba, the mother following, as long as she 
could, the rapidly moving column to which 
the father was attached. 

There were three years of this camp life 
for little Victor. To an ordinary child they 
would have signified little, but to one ex- 
ceptionally precocious and by nature highly 
imaginative they probably meant much. Dr. 
Bushnell tells us that more is done to affect 
the character of children before they learn to 
talk than after ; that this is their " impres- 
sional and plastic age ; " that " whatever is 
impressed or inserted here, at this early point, 
must be profoundly seminal as regards all 
the future developments of the character." * 
If anything like this is true, the surroundings 
of this little child for the first three years 
must have left their impression on his char- 
acter. The emotional nature was, no doubt, 
sufficiently stimulated in these experiences ; 

1 Christian Nurture, pp. 238, 239. 



VICTOR HUGO, THE MAN OF LETTERS 149 

if the character thus nurtured should in after 
years manifest rather more of passionate in- 
tensity than of philosophic calm there would 
be honest cause for it. The child whose home 
is in a camp and who catches daily from the 
face and from the lips of his mother her anx- 
iety for the father whose life is often exposed 
to mortal peril, has begun his life in a kind 
of school which we should not choose for all 
our children. In one of his earlier poems 
Victor tells us how his cradle was sometimes 
rocked upon the head of a bass drum, and 
how he had learned in his childhood to drink 
water brought from the brook in a soldier's 
helmet, and how his covering in his sleep had 
sometimes been a tattered battle-flag. 

In 1805, that portion of the army to which 
Sigisbert Hugo was attached was ordered to 
Italy, and the mother, with her three little 
boys, was compelled to return to Paris. Here 
for two years they dwelt, and here the child's 
education was begun. There was much flit- 
ting, after this, back and forth, to Italy and 
Spain, and a great deal of experience was ac- 
cumulated during the first ten years of the 
lad's life ; but for the greater part of the time 
the mother and her sons lived in Paris, her 



150 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

husband away at the wars. These extended 
separations boded no good to the family ; the 
result was the estrangement and the perma- 
nent separation of the father and mother. 
Some of the biographers ascribe this to politi- 
cal differences, — the mother being a devotee 
of the old regime, while the father was a wor- 
shiper of Napoleon; but this is not, prob- 
ably, the whole story. At all events the mo- 
ther finds herself charged with the sole care 
of her three boys ; in the direction of their 
education the father appears to have reserved 
some rights, but she is mainly responsible. 

A rather queer mixture of social and moral 
influences it was that encompassed this eager 
and impressionable boy. His mother, as we 
have seen, was an ardent champion of the 
Bourbon dynasty, but the theological outfit 
which usually went with that type of politics 
she wholly lacked ; instead of being a loyal 
Catholic she was a free-thinker after Vol- 
taire's own heart ; she would not permit her 
sons at school to take part in the mass ; she 
encouraged them to read Voltaire and Rous- 
seau and Diderot. Madame Sigisbert Hugo 
was a woman of much strength of character, 
and of some tender and passionate loyalty, 



VICTOB HUGO, THE MAN OF LETTERS 151 

but the religious side of her nature had never 
been developed. 

Victor's first teacher, M. Lariviere, was an 
unfrocked priest who had married his cook ; 
it does not appear probable that his influence 
over the child's mind could have been strin- 
gent in the repression of liberal tendencies. 
In his later years Hugo conceived that his 
early education had been of an extremely con- 
servative type ; to that fact he ascribed the 
monarchical and religious spirit of his earlier 
works. But this is certainly unfair to those 
who had the care of him. It is not, indeed, 
easy to understand just how he came by such 
opinions as he found himself in possession of in 
the days of his adolescence. His royalisms we 
may impute to his mother ; his religious faith 
must have been of more spontaneous growth. 
Perhaps there was a natural religiousness in 
him, which readily responded to the deeper 
verities of the spirit. In one of his poems, 
published when he was in exile at Guernsey, 
he describes an experience in " The Feuillan- 
tines " — their first home in Paris — where he 
and his two little brothers, left to themselves 
for an afternoon, found in an old convent loft 
a book which was on a shelf beyond their 
reach : — j 



152 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

" One day we tried until we reached the great black book. 
How 't was I cannot say that we the treasure took, 
But that a Bible 't was, this I remember well. 

" Just like a censer's smell was the old book's perfume. 
Rejoiced, at once we sought the corner of the room ; 
We found it full of prints, what glory and delight ! 

"We spread our precious prize wide open on our knees, 
And the first words we read did so our fancy please 
That we went reading on, our games forgotten quite. 

" Thus we three read and read, till out the morning ran, 
Joseph, Ruth, Boaz, and the Good Samaritan ; 
And ever better pleased, at eve, too, read it oft. 

" As children who have made some bird of heaven their prize, 
Laughing, each other call, with joyous wondering eyes, 
To find beneath their hands how smooth its down and soft." 



This is probably a credible reminiscence, and 
it shows that his mind was not, at this time, 
being forced into the moulds of traditionalism. 
In fact, we may very well hesitate, upon such 
evidence as his own writings furnish us, to ac- 
cept Victor Hugo's estimate either of his early 
conservatism or his later radicalism. He was 
never such a bigot as he charges himself with 
being, nor was he ever such an agnostic as he 
tries to make out. Toward institutional re- 
ligion there was some change in his attitude ; 
toward the greater truths of spiritual religion 



VICTOR HUGO, THE MAN OF LETTERS 153 

none worth emphasizing. The home of the 
mother and her three little boys in Paris was 
in a large house once attached to a convent, 
and connected with a great uncultivated gar- 
den that was half a park ; here the lads had 
happy times together, and there is a little girl 
of the neighborhood, Adele Foucher, who is 
their constant playfellow. The elder of the 
boys, Abel, goes to the Lycee, a public school 
not far away ; the two younger, Eugene and 
Victor, are under the care of that ex-priest, M. 
Lariviere. In Victor's twelfth year the two 
are removed by the father's request to the 
Pension Cordier et Decotte, to be prepared for 
the Polytechnic School, which is the training 
place for military service, especially for military 
engineering. Here they remain three years. 

Belying the auguries of his feeble infancy, 
Victor grew up to be a stout and vigorous 
boy, full of life and enterprise, fond of fun 
and not averse to fighting. " The future king 
of men," says M. Marzials, " began by being 
king of boys. He and his brother led rival 
parties among their school companions, and 
exercised most despotic rule." * 

His activity was not, however, all muscular. 

1 Life of Victor Hugo, p. 13. 



154 WITNESSES OF TEE LIGHT 

He left this school in his sixteenth year, but 
not before he had done a prodigious amount 
of writing, — verse-making mainly, some of 
which had already won him considerable dis- 
tinction. Genius is a term almost copious 
enough for the use of a reporter ; just what 
it connotes we may not confidently say, but 
we can hardly go amiss in ascribing it to this 
youth. Imagination of the most fecund sort 
he certainly possessed, and into his young life 
had been poured such a wealth of experience 
as falls to the lot of few. He had feasted his 
young eyes on the beauty of Italy, he had re- 
veled amid the romantic scenes of Spain ; he 
knew very intimately the meaning of war ; the 
throes of the Napoleonic struggle, the passion- 
ate joy of France over the great victories, her 
piteous prostration when the desperate game 
was played out — all of this had entered into 
his boyish experience, and smitten, with might, 
on all the chords of life. Verse was the only 
vent for this surging emotion. His father had 
forbidden him to make verses ; that was like 
forbidding a rivulet to run down hill. I do 
not find that he neglected his other work in 
school ; he took high rank in mathematics and 
in physics, but the amount of literary pro- 



VICTOR HUGO, THE MAN OF LETTERS 155 

duction is almost incredible. " During the 
three years which he spent at the Pension De- 
cotte," says Madame Hugo, " he wrote verses 
of every possible kind, — odes, satires, epistles, 
poems, tragedies, elegies, idyls, imitations of 
Ossian, translations of Virgil, of Lucian, of 
Ansonius, of Martial, songs, fables, tales, epi- 
grams, madrigals, logographs, acrostics, cha- 
rades, rebuses, impromptus. He even wrote a 
comic opera." Mr. Marzials quotes a dictum 
of Theophile Gautier to the effect that a poet 
ought to exercise his 'prentice hand on at least 
fifty thousand lines of verse before ever writ- 
ing anything for publication, and expresses 
the opinion that Victor Hugo must have come 
up to this demand. 1 

When he was fifteen the French Academy 
proposed this subject for a prize poem : " The 
Happiness that Study can procure in Every 
Situation of Life." A promising theme for 
a poet, verily ! The Immortals must have 
evolved it from a studious perusal of the En- 
cyclopaedia. As well expect one to wax ima- 
ginative and lyrical over the multiplication 
table or a book of logarithms. But that was 
what you had to write about, a. d. 1817, if 

1 Life of Victor Hugo, p. 36. 



156 WITXESSES OF THE LIGHT 

you wished to gain the prize of the French 
Academy. Victor Hugo was equal to mak- 
ing poetry out of almost anything, and he 
plunged into the contest with no misgivings. 
How to get it before that august body when 
written was the problem. A friendly usher of 
the school who was in the secret took the boys 
out walking, led them to the fountain in front 
of the Institute, and while the rest of them 
were watching the fishes, ran with Victor into 
the office of the secretary, dropped the manu- 
script there, and ran away again. It was an 
amazing presumption, no doubt, for a boy of 
fifteen to compete for the poetical prize of 
the French Academy ; but the amazing fact 
is that, although he did not win the prize, — 
which was split, that year, between M. Le- 
brun, the author of " Marie Stuart," and 
Saintine, the author of " Piceiola," — he was 
accredited an " honorable mention," his name 
being the ninth on the list. Doubtless the vow 
which the lad had registered in his copy book 
the year before, " I will be Chateaubriand or 
nothing," seemed even to himself a little less 
audacious after this. 

From this hour he goes steadily forward, 
never slackening his rate of production. One 



VICTOR HUGO, THE MAN OF LETTERS 157 

of the elements of genius he certainly pos- 
sesses, capacity for sustained, intense, concen- 
trated effort. His calling is as clear to him 
as Michelangelo's was at the same age ; no 
Ecole Polytechnique for him ; not a military 
engineer by any means ; the pen is his tool, 
and it will be mightier in his hand than the 
sword. 

All this is in sharp opposition to his father's 
will ; therefore the allowance is cut off and 
Victor is left to struggle for bread. For the 
next four years his pen flies swiftly. His elder 
brother Abel has also become a writer, and 
the two youths launch a semi-monthly journal 
named the " Conservateur Litteraire." The 
title conveys the purpose of the periodical ; it 
is to gather up and express the most conserva- 
tive ideas in literature and art ; the youth 
who is to stand forth a few years later as the 
champion of romanticism in literature now 
holds a brief for the classicists. The amount 
of his contribution to this periodical was enor- 
mous. Poetry of many kinds, historical 
sketches, political essays, stories, literary criti- 
cism, discussions of painting and the drama, 
— it is remarkable how many things the 
youth attempts and with what cleverness they 



158 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

are done. The magazine was maintained for 
a year and a half and formed three volumes, 
— two thirds of it all by Victor. In 1822 
a volume of odes and poems was gathered 
out of this periodical and published, the first 
volume from his pen. 

The financial success of this journal had not 
been brilliant ; in the fight for life through 
all those days there was never a moment's 
truce. Seven hundred francs — one hundred 
and forty dollars — was the extent of one 
year's income ; out of that he saved enough 
to buy a dress coat with gilt buttons, and he 
often had a little money to lend. What rigid 
economy all this involved may be guessed at 
by some of us. In " Les Miserables," the 
experiences of Marius, just setting out as a 
young litterateur, are undoubtedly autobio- 
graphical. 

" Life became severe for Marius : eating 
his clothes and his watch was nothing, but he 
also went through that indescribable course 
which is called ' roughing it.' This is a horri- 
ble thing which contains days without bread, 
nights without sleep, evenings without can- 
dle, a house without a fire, weeks without 
work, a future without hope, a threadbare 



VICTOR HUGO, THE MAN OF LETTERS 159 

coat, an old hat at which the girls laugh, the 
door which you find locked at night because 
you have not paid your rent, the insolence of 
the porter and the eating-house keeper, the 
grins of neighbors, humiliations, dignity tram- 
pled under foot, any kind of work accepted, 
disgust, bitterness, and desperation. Marius 
learned how all this is devoured, and how it 
is often the only thing that a man has to eat. 
At that moment of life when a man requires 
pride because he requires love, he felt himself 
derided because he was meanly dressed and 
ridiculous because he was poor. At the age 
when youth swells the heart with an imperial 
pride, he looked down more than once at his 
worn-out boots and knew the unjust shame 
and burning blushes of wretchedness. It is 
an admirable and terrible trial from which the 
weak come forth infamous and the strong 
sublime. It is the crucible into which destiny 
throws a man whenever it wishes to have a 
scoundrel or a demigod." * 

In the midst of this struggle with poverty 
the death of his mother brings his first deep 
sorrow. It was not, indeed, until his home 
was broken up that his circumstances became 

1 Les Miserdbles : Marius, y. 1. 



160 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

desperate. Through all this bitter experience 
he had been cherishing a tender regard for 
the little girl who used to play with him in 
the old garden ; they had not been permitted 
to meet very often, but the childish attach- 
ment strengthened with their years, and on 
the death of his mother Victor sought her, and 
their common sorrow melted the hearts of her 
obdurate parents, so that their betrothal was 
sanctioned, and there was nothing between 
them and home but the winning of a liveli- 
hood. For that they had not long to wait. 
The first edition of his Odes brought him 
quick recognition and something more; he 
realized from the sale quite a substantial 
sum of money, and the king, Louis XVIII. 
granted him from the privy purse a pension 
of one thousand francs. Thus Victor is able, 
in his twenty-first year, to claim his Adele. 
They were married at St. Sulpice, and found 
their first home with the parents of the bride 
at Chantilly. 

In 1823, not long after his marriage, ap- 
peared his first novel, " Han d'Islande," a 
somewhat lurid and ghastly tale, the produc- 
tion, Hugo himself said long afterward, " of 
a young man, of a very young man. One feels 



VICTOR HUGO, TEE MAN OF LETTERS 161 

in reading it that the child who wrote it had 
as yet no experience of things, of men, or of 
ideas, and that he sought to divine them all." 
Along with this sensational story were pub- 
lished one or two other collections of odes 
and ballads, and the star of the poet began 
to ascend. The king increased the poet's 
pension on account of some pretty things 
which Victor had said about him, and the 
fortunes of the young housekeepers were 
flourishing. 

With the exception of " Han d'Islande," 
Hugo's work had kept closely to classical 
models. In his preface to the volume entitled 
" Nouvelles Odes," which appeared in March, 
1824, he disclaims partisanship in the quarrel 
between the classicists and romanticists, but 
pretty clearly indicates his own adherence to 
the literary methods of Boileau and Racine. 
In 1827, when he was twenty-five years of age, 
a sudden change came over the spirit of his 
dream. The youth who had been a stickler 
for the nice proprieties and conventional ele- 
gancies of the old French masters struck out 
in a most daring way into a wholly new style. 
A drama, " Cromwell," was the first venture 
in this new form. The preface to this play 



162 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

announced his new theory of dramatic poetry 
and opened a battle that was not fought out 
for many a day. 

The eighteenth century had stiffened and 
petrified poetry. You know how precise and 
formal much of our English verse of that 
period was; how Pope, and Thomson, and 
Collins, and Young, and Akenside measured 
it out and trussed it up and starched it and 
ironed it and counted its ruffles and its gussets, 
and combed its hair, and made it sit down on 
a stool in the corner and fold its hands and be 
good ; the propriety of the poor muse under 
all these nurses and schoolmasters and drill 
masters was something melancholy. 

From this dreary conventionalism English 
poetry freed itself much earlier than French ; 
indeed the literary formalities were never quite 
so rigid north of the channel, and we had our 
own splendid background of Chaucer and 
Spenser, and Ben Jonson and Shakespeare, in 
whose presence literary art could not long be 
mummified ; so that in the early part of our 
century Wordsworth and Scott and Shelley 
and Byron and Keats and Coleridge led 
poesy out into the English fields and woods 
and set her free. But the day of deliverance 



VICTOR HUGO, THE MAN OF LETTERS 163 

came later in France, — chiefly, perhaps, be- 
cause there was an Academy over there ; and 
a literary Academy is a great force for keep- 
ing literature to the proprieties, but not for 
informing it with new life. Deliverance came, 
at length, and it was Victor Hugo who stood 
forth as the protagonist in this emancipation. 
" Dramatic verse," he maintained in the pre- 
face to his " Cromwell," " should be free, 
frank, direct, sufficiently outspoken to say 
everything without prudery or affectation, 
able to pass by natural transition from the 
comic to the tragic, from the sublime to the 
grotesque, by terms matter-of-fact and prac- 
tical, at once artistic and inspired, profound 
and full of surprises, large and true." 

Such was the doctrine, good and whole- 
some, beyond doubt ; and the practice, so far 
as Hugo was concerned, was made to corre- 
spond. "Cromwell" was far too long to be 
acted, but after a while appeared another play, 
" Hernani ; " a venturesome manager under- 
took to stage it and the battle was on. A 
large number of the younger litterateurs, 
students and artists, partisans of the new mode 
in art and letters, determined that the play 
should succeed, while the great body of the 



164 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

respectable and conservative writers and critics 
and players meant that it should be driven 
from the stage. It was a motley crowd of the 
young romanticists that gathered for the first 
night of " Hernani." You could hardly call 
them the sans-culottes of the literary revolu- 
tion, for they had on clothes enough, such 
as they were ; in Madame Hugo's words, 
"strange, uncouth, bearded, long-haired, 
dressed in every manner except according to 
the existing fashion, in loose jerkins, in Span- 
ish cloaks, in Robespierre waistcoats, in Henry 
III. bonnets, having every century upon their 
shoulders and heads." Evidently these young 
men were ready to go far in their protest 
against conventionalities. They gained en- 
trance in a body to the theatre at two o'clock 
in the afternoon, to hold the seats against the 
onrush of their adversaries ; they brought with 
them sausages, ham, chocolate, and bread, 
and made a picnic of it. When the hour of 
seven came and the performance began, bed- 
lam was let loose. All the evening the house 
was in an uproar. The beauties of the play, 
and they were not wanting, were applauded 
to the echo by partisans of the new mode ; its 
grotesque and unconventional features were 



VICTOR HUGO, THE MAN OF LETTERS 165 

greeted with hisses and hootings by the other 
side. So it went on for forty-five nights, with 
roars of laughter and tumults of applause, 
with jeers and cheers. " Each performance/' 
says Madame Hugo, " became an indescribable 
tumult. The boxes sneered and tittered, the 
stalls whistled; it became a fashionable pas- 
time to go and laugh at ' Hernani.' Every one 
protested after his manner and according to his 
individual nature. Some, as not being able to 
bear to look at such a piece, turned their backs 
to the performance ; others declared aloud 
that they could stand it no longer and went 
out in the middle of the acts, banging the 
doors of their boxes as they went. The more 
peaceable ostentatiously spread out and read 
their newspapers." 

What was it all about ? It was simply the 
question whether dramatic poetry should con- 
form to the rules and models of the French 
classic drama, or whether it might wear a looser 
costume and travel at a freer gait. One would 
say that there might have been a little more 
toleration on both sides, but that was not 
their way. Frenchmen say that the English 
take their pleasures sadly ; certain it is that 
the French contend for their aesthetic prefer- 



166 WITNESSES OF TEE LIGHT 

ences furiously. Art is the religion of many of 
them ; and human nature can be just as secta- 
rian and just as intolerant in art as in religion. 
There was, no doubt, a bigoted orthodoxy of 
literary art in those days which had determined 
that no novelties of expression should be al- 
lowed, and this petty tyranny had to be defied 
and overthrown. This was the movement of 
which Victor Hugo was the leader. On the 
whole it won an important victory for art, but 
victories won in such passionate contests are 
always costly ; much that was precious in the 
old literature these fierce reformers despised 
and trampled under their feet, and that was 
not good for them nor for their art. The new 
literature, under Hugo's championship, won 
its battle to this extent, — it gained the right 
to exist, and the heresy of the first quarter of 
the century became the orthodoxy of the sec- 
ond. It did not, however, overthrow or exter- 
minate the classic literature ; that still abides 
in honor and power. 

Not only into dramatic poetry, but into lyr- 
ical as well, the same courageous innovations 
were carried ; the volumes of verse that ap- 
peared, one after another, from Hugo's pen, 
struck another and a distinctly fresher note. 



VICTOR HUGO, THE MAN OF LETTERS 167 

It seems to be admitted that the verse of Vic- 
tor Hugo touches the high-water mark of lit- 
erary art in France. Of this none can speak 
confidently but those who know French well 
enough to think in it. Translations of poetry, 
in their best estate, are but dim images of the 
original beauty. The perfection of the poem 
consists not only in the idea, but especially in 
the form, — in the music of the line, in the 
collocation of the words, in sweet suggestions 
that come through assonance as well as rhythm 
and rhyme, in delicate shadings of meaning 
which can no more be transferred from lan- 
guage to language than one woman's smile 
can be imitated by another woman. It is only 
the skeleton of a poem which we get in the 
best translation ; yet the versions which are 
presented to us by Hugo's translators indicate 
something of the wealth of his imagination. 
Those who have a right to speak tell us that 
he was a master of melody ; the claim is even 
made for him that he is the greatest lyric 
poet of all literature. 

His first signal triumph as a novelist was 
won by his " Notre Dame de Paris," published 
in 1831, when he was twenty-nine years old, 
— a magnificent historical romance, bringing 



168 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

back in a series of sketches and characteriza- 
tions the life of the fifteenth century. With 
the publication of this book Victor Hugo 
takes a place of honor and eminence. At this 
early age he is certainly among the most dis- 
tinguished men of letters in the world. A 
band of the most loyal admirers are chanting 
his praises. He has a happy home, and his 
three children, Leopoldine, Charles Francois, 
Victor, are the delight of his heart. 

Most of his literary production during the 
ten years that follow is poetic, and the strain 
is tinged with a certain melancholy. " Au- 
tumn Leaves," " Songs of the Twilight," 
" Voices Within," " The Rays and the Shad- 
ows," — the titles of the books suggest the 
pensive atmosphere of much of this work. 
What the cause of this may be we but dimly 
understand ; the disillusions which come with 
success, one may fancy. The great prizes of 
life are splendid, — until we have won them. 
It was one who had gotten about all that man 
can crave who cried : " Vanity of vanities, all 
is vanity ! " 

Possibly Hugo's soul was shadowed by the 
clouds that hung over the nation. Poor 
France had been through her Inferno just 



VICTOR HUGO, THE MAN OF LETTERS 169 

before he was born, and it was by no means 
clear that the Purgatorio of the Restoration, 
through which she had been passing since the 
downfall of Napoleon, was leading her to 
Paradise. Unhappy France ! In the long 
night of medisevalism she had wandered with 
the rest in the glooms of the wilderness, and 
in the massacre of St. Bartholomew she had 
put out the light that might have guided her 
to freedom and peace. The slaughter of a 
hundred thousand such men as perished on 
that fateful night is a crime for which it will 
take some centuries to atone. The Revolu- 
tion and the unrest which followed it were 
the natural penalty of the extermination of 
that element in the population which might 
have led the nation forward in the paths of 
peaceful progress. When the Revolution had 
swept away the old regime, steady hands to 
guide the people were wanting, and the man 
on horseback seized his opportunity. When 
his vast usurpations had brought down upon 
France the inevitable retribution, the people, 
in despair, called back the Bourbon princes, 
and the reaction was accomplished. 

When Louis XVIII. returned to Paris, Vic- 
tor Hugo was a boy in school ; his mother's 



170 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

passionate loyalty found full expression, and 
he shared her exultation. His earlier writings 
are tinged with this sentiment ; the king was 
kind to the budding poet, and to speak truth, 
he was a gracious and liberal ruler, the best 
of the Bourbons, and always disposed to en- 
large the bounds of freedom. But when, at 
his death, Charles X. succeeded him, the 
worst elements of Bourbon rule were again in 
power, and the buried seeds of popular dis- 
content quickly sprouted. Nor did the over- 
throw of this despot and the accession of 
Louis Philippe greatly mend matters ; it was 
a weak and sordid rule ; the popular fermen- 
tation increased, and the Second Revolution 
was gathering its forces. Through this period 
Victor Hugo had been rapidly unlearning his 
early lessons in politics and was becoming less 
and less a worshiper of monarchy. When 
Charles X. went out and Louis Philippe came 
in, his word was : " What we require is a re- 
public in fact and a monarchy in name." As 
the time wore on and the monarchy in name 
brought slight relief, he began to think that 
the name might as well be dropped ; so that 
when the days of 'Forty-eight ushered in the 
Second Revolution, it found him a convinced 



VICTOR HUGO, THE MAN OF LETTERS 171 

Republican, yet of moderate views. He was a 
member of the constituent assembly by which 
the Republic was decreed, and his whole con- 
duct through the earlier part of that turbulent 
period was full of dignity and wisdom. But 
the fierce outbreak of the more radical ele- 
ment again provoked a reaction, and the 
man on horseback was soon again in power. 
Against the brazen and conscienceless usurpa- 
tions of Louis Napoleon, Victor Hugo fought 
with all his might. Something theatrical 
there is, no doubt, in his attitude through this 
final struggle ; more than once he hurts the 
cause by his violence ; many of his speeches 
may be fine rhetoric, but they are poor politics; 
they helped to deepen the popular distrust of 
the more radical Republicans and thus to clear 
the path for the usurper. Still there shines 
through it all the spirit of a great-hearted man 
to whom such abominable treachery and base- 
ness as that by which the Third Napoleon 
climbed to the throne is a thing with which 
no compromise can be made, for which no 
excuses can be admitted ; a thing which suc- 
cess only makes more hateful and damnable ; 
a thing which must be resisted to the end and 
driven from the earth, if we mean that the 



172 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

earth shall be a fit place for men to live in. 
In all this hot and relentless wrath against 
this monumental usurper, Victor Hugo wins 
the admiration of every man of honor. Of 
course, when the coup d'etat had fully suc- 
ceeded, Paris was not a safe place for him. 
Whether a price was set upon his head by 
Louis Napoleon or not, it is certain that he 
was the last man whom that dictator wanted 
near his throne. For some days he was a 
fugitive, flitting from place to place. At last, 
with a forged passport and in disguise, he es- 
caped to Brussels, whence, within a short time, 
he issued his terrific indictment of the usurper, 
" Napoleon the Little." In all literature we 
shall not find fiercer invective. The French 
language lends itself to purposes of this 
nature, — its rapier-like point and keenness of 
edge make it a telling weapon. No man ever 
wielded it more skillfully than Hugo ; these 
sentences flash and crackle and hiss in their 
intensity. It was a mighty testimony, and 
it was its truth that made it terrible. And 
although it seemed to pass almost unheeded, 
and France, caring more for peace than for 
honor, stifled her conscience for many a day, 
and suffered this usurper to lift her into a 



VICTOR HUGO, THE MAN OF LETTERS 173 

fool's paradise of false prosperity that he 
might plunge her into the abyss of dishonor 
and dismemberment, through all these years 
the lightnings of this insatiable invective 
never ceased smiting the foundations of that 
crumbling throne, nor its thunders from call- 
ing on the heavens for the retribution which, 
though it tarried long, came at length with 
terrible majesty. 

The immediate result of the publication of 
the book was the expulsion of Hugo from 
Brussels ; the Belgian government did not dare 
to harbor such a foe to the French emperor, 
and he was bidden to depart out of their 
coasts. So he took up his journey to the Isle 
of Jersey, one of the English islands in the 
channel, not far from the northern coast of 
France, on which, and on its sister island of 
Guernsey, for eighteen years, and until the 
fall of the Second Empire, in 1870, he made 
his home. He might have gone back earlier, 
but he would not go ; under that detestable 
empire he would never live. 

Here in this beautiful seclusion he endured 
as best he could the loneliness of exile ; his 
time was all his own and his pen was in his 
hand ; a large part of the work by which he 



174 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

is best known was the fruit of this solitude. 
Of his poems the volumes entitled " Chast 
nients/' •'•' Contemplations," and " The Le- 
gends of the Centuries " were here produced ; 
of his prose works, *'•' Les Miserables," " The 
Toilers of the Sea/"' and •• The Man who 
Laughs." 

The volume entitled " Contemplations."' 
however, though it was not pubhshed until 
1856. contains much work which had been 
done at an earlier day. It was in 184:3. nearly 
ten years before his exile, that his eldest 
daughter Leopoldine. who had been his most 
intimate companion, was married to Charles 
Yacquerie. One of his most touching poems 
is that in which he sends the light of his eves 
and the joy of his heart away to another 
home : — 

" Love him who loves thee and with him be blest : 
Farewell ; his treasure be as thou art mine ! 
Go. my blest child, to the new home, now thine, 
And make them happy, and leave us disrrest. 

" We would fain keep ; they long for thee the while ; 
Daughter, wife, angel child, with duties cope 
Twofold ; leave us regret, and bring them hope ; 

Go f:::_ " ::_ :- :s and enter with a smile! " 

There is another touching lvric which ima- 



VICTOR HUGO, THE MAN OF LETTERS 175 

gines the loneliness that her departure will 
leave behind : — 

" To the fields what shall I say — 
Witness of my hopeless woe ? 
With the stars' bright golden ray, 
With the flowers, what shall I do ? 



" What, without thy fellowship 

Do with day ? do with the skies ? 
With my kiss without thy lip ? 

With my tears, without thine eyes ? " 

But the imagined loneliness of this partial 
separation was a sweet sorrow compared with 
the overwhelming grief that was in store for 
him. Within a few months Leopoldine and 
her husband, out for an evening's sail upon 
the Seine, were overturned by a sudden wind, 
and both were drowned. It was the one 
tragedy of Hugo's life ; for a long time it 
benumbed him ; there was no music in him; 
the motive of lif e was gone. When at last he 
found his voice, how piteous is the cry ! 

" When we our life together led 
On the hillside, now long ago, 
Where waved the trees and waters sped, 

Where the house hugged the wood below, — 

" She was ten years ; thrice ten was I ; 
I was the universe to her ; 
How sweet the grass ; how clear the sky 
Beneath the thick green woods of fir ! 



176 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

" My lot she glad and happy made, 
My labors light, and blue my sky ; 
When she * My father I ' to me said, 
My full heart would < My God ! ' reply. 

" I was so young when she was born 
To shine upon my destiny ; 
She was the child of my glad mom, 
The star of dawn that lit my sky." 

Yet it is not a rebellious cry. There is one 
most pathetic song, in which he stands at her 
grave and lifts up his lamentation to the In- 
finite One above him, pouring out the deepest 
woe of his heart submissively yet pleadingly 
— begging that he may not be too severely 
judged if he cannot find comfort : — 

" I come to thee, O Lord, who art, I know, 
O living God ! good, merciful, and kind ; 
I own that you alone know what you do ; 
That men are reeds that tremble in the wind. 

" I say the tomb wherein the dead are shut 
Opes on the heavenly hall ; 
And what we here for end of all things put 
Is the first step of all. 

" To-day I who erst was as a mother weak 

Crouch at your feet, before your open skies ; 
I feel a light on my dark sorrows break, 
As on your worlds I look with juster eyes. 

" Lord, now I see the madness of the man 
Who e'er to murmur dares ; 



VICTOR HUGO, THE MAN OF LETTERS 177 

I cease from all reproach, I cease to ban, 
But oh, permit me tears." 

Without this volume of " Contemplations " 
the world would never have known the depths 
of Victor Hugo's nature. 

I must hasten to give in the briefest form 
a mere outline of the last years of this event- 
ful life. 

In September, 1870, after the battle of 
Sedan had pulverized Napoleon le Petit, Vic- 
tor Hugo hastened back to Paris. It was late 
in the evening when he arrived, but his com- 
ing had been noised abroad, and a crowd was 
waiting for him at the station. " Vive Victor 
Hugo ! " they cried ; " but there were wounded 
men in the train, and the shout was silenced, 
to be taken up again," says the reporter, " out- 
side the station, by thousands upon thousands 
of throats, and to roll, like a great sea of accla- 
mation, all along the way to Paul Meurice's 
house. ' Never,' says M. Alphonse Daudet, 
the novelist, — ' never can I forget the sight 
as the carriage passed along the Rue Lafayette, 
Victor Hugo standing up and being literally 
borne along by the multitude.' " * 

1 Marzial's Life of Victor Hugo, p. 191. 



178 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

It was a royal welcome, but troublous days 
were these, and the poet's whole thought was 
given to the rescue of his people. The iron 
ring of the German army was closing around 
Paris. By permission of the German king 
a representative Assembly was chosen by the 
French people, to meet in Bordeaux and deter- 
mine what France should do in this exigency. 
Would it continue the war or would it con- 
sent to be despoiled of Alsace and Lorraine? 
Victor Hugo was elected to this Assembly. 
His speeches were battle cries. His heart was 
stout for resistance. The Assembly was full 
of confusion ; no clear policy was presented ; 
Hugo's speeches did not help to crystallize 
opinion. Suddenly he struck a note that 
made hideous discord — not because it was a 
false note, but because it was clear and true. 
Garibaldi had been chosen to the Assembly 
from Algiers, and there was a proposition to 
annul that election. Why ? Because the 
rural gentry, who were good Catholics, were 
strong in the Assembly, and Garibaldi was 
anti-clerical. The proposition to throw out 
Garibaldi roused Victor Hugo. No power 
in Europe, he said, had come to the defense 
of France in this struggle. " Not a king, not 



VICTOR HUGO, THE MAN OF LETTERS 179 

a state, none, with one single exception. This 
man, what did he have ? His sword. This 
sword had delivered one people. It might 
save another. He thought so ; he came ; he 
fought for us." 1 The Assembly was at once 
in an uproar. " Death to Victor Hugo ! 
Death ! Death ! " shouted some of these ex- 
cited Frenchmen. The insult was more than 
he could endure. Turning upon the mob that 
was yelling at him he shouted : " Three 
weeks ago you refused to listen to Garibaldi. 
To-day you refuse to listen to me. This is 
enough. I tender you my resignation." 2 It 
was written in a moment and handed to the 
president, and Victor Hugo walked out of 
the Assembly ; not a dignified action assur- 
edly, though a generous sentiment inspired 
it. It was no time for heroics, but rather 
for conciliatory speech and judicious action. 
Neither the mob that raged at the praise of 
Garibaldi, nor the orator who provoked and 
then resented their rage showed much capacity 
for statesmanship. 

This practically ended his public service. 

1 Victor Hugo, his Life and Works, by Alfred Barbou, 
p. 150. 

2 Ibid. 151. 



180 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

He was, indeed, once more elected to the Sen- 
ate, and after the suppression of the Commune 
he exerted all his powers to secure clemency 
for the communards, but his active participa- 
tion in public affairs from this time forward 
amounts to little. 

His pen is as busy as ever. From his seven- 
tieth to his eighty-third year his production 
was larger than that of the entire lifetime of 
some men of renown. Not less than seventeen 
volumes were published during this period, 
among them his last great novel " Ninety- 
Three " and several volumes of verse, — two 
more volumes of " Legends of the Centuries," 
one entitled, " The Four Winds of the Spirit," 
and one — most charming of all — written 
for his grandchildren, " The Art of Being a 
Grandfather" (L'Art d f Etre Grandpere). 
Into this beautiful book he gathered the late 
blooms of his affection for all that were left of 
his household. His wife had gone to her rest 
in 1868 ; his son Francis, in 1873 ; Charles 
died suddenly on the day of his resignation 
of the senatorship in Bordeaux; the widow 
of Charles, with her two children, Georges and 
Jeanne, made his household in the Rue de 
Clichy. It was a serene old age. As death 



VICTOB HUGO, THE MAN OF LETTERS 181 

drew near his spirit was at peace ; his hopes 
were bright for the life to come, and his opti- 
mism was clear and strong to the end. On 
May 22, 1885, his deliverance came. 

The memorandum relating to his funeral, 
given to a friend some time before his death, 
said : " I give 50,000 francs to the poor. I 
wish to be taken to the grave in their hearse. 
I refuse the prayers of all churches. I ask for 
a prayer from every human soul. I believe in 
God." 

On the morning of May 31, by order of the 
government, they carried his body up to the 
Arch of Triumph, and it lay there in state for 
one day in a coffin richly draped with black 
and silver and royal purple ; then it was car- 
ried to the grave as the poet had decreed in a 
pauper's hearse, but with splendid pomp, in 
a great procession and with such tributes of 
respect and reverence as France has rarely 
bestowed on her most illustrious dead. 

As we seek now to gather up the results of 
this great life, what can we say of it ? It has 
been made clear by this recital that we are 
not dealing with a perfect character. Victor 
Hugo's limitations are apparent. His central 
fault, no doubt, was his egotism, which was 



182 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

colossal. Mr. Marzials puts his finger on the 
great man's weakness : — 

" The fact is, and one says it sadly, there 
was a strong element of theatricality about the 
man. Great as he was, he liked to appear 
greater. His statements about himself, his 
surroundings, the events in which he had him- 
self taken part, bear often the same propor- 
tion to fact that the stage bears to real life. 
They lack the simplicity of truth. They are, 
in effect, false. There, the murder is out; 
and if there be any one who cannot esteem a 
character tainted with theatricality, why then 
he must leave Victor Hugo unhonored. But 
I, for one, shall not agree with him. Behind 
the actor in Victor was a man, and a great 
man, in his private life simple, genial, and 
kindly, and in his public life filled with pas- 
sionate convictions for which he was pre- 
pared to battle and to suffer. In the essential 
heart of him he was genuine enough. The 
theatricality, the vainglory, were of the sur- 
face." 1 

Hugo is an artist whose pictures are mainly 
in black and white ; neutral tints and soft 
grays are not much employed. He deals too 

1 Life of Victor Hugo, pp. 209, 210. 



VICTOR HUGO, THE MAN OF LETTERS 183 

much in contrasts and superlatives ; tie screams 
too often. There is, as Robert Louis Steven- 
son has said, " an emphasis which is akin to 
weakness, a strength that is a little epileptic. ,, 
Those who deny that art can have a moral 
purpose must, of course, exclude Victor Hugo 
from the ranks of the artists. His art, if art 
it was, was pretty nearly all moral purpose. 
Divest his poems and his stories of the enthu- 
siasm of humanity and there would be little 
left of most of them. His own definition of 
art is pertinent just here : — 

" Art, 't is a glory, a delight ; 
In the tempest it holds fire-flight ; 

It irradiates the deep blue sky. 
Art, splendor infinite, 
On the brow of the People doth sit, 

As a star in God's heaven most high. 

" Art, 't is Humanity's thought 
Which shatters chains century-wrought ! 

Art, 't is the conqueror sweet ! 
Unto Art — each world river, each sea ! 
Slave-People, 't is Art makes free ; 

Free-People, 't is Art makes great." 

Of all his novels it is especially true that the 
moral significance is their very substance. In 
" Notre Dame " the purpose is to show how 
inevitable are the disasters which a foolish and 



184 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

rigid superstition always entails ; in " The 
Toilers " it is the bitter fight of man with the 
external forces that moves our hearts; in 
" The Man who Laughs " the brutality of Eng- 
lish aristocracy comes in for a scourging ; and 
in the greatest of all, £ Les Miserables," the 
moral purpose is, as Mr. Stevenson explains 
it, " to awaken us a little, if it may be — for 
such awakenings are unpleasant — to the 
great cost of the society that we enjoy and 
profit by ; to the labor and sweat of those 
who support the litter, civilization, in which 
we ourselves are so smoothly carried forward. 
People are all glad to shut their eyes, and it 
gives them a very simple pleasure to forget 
that our laws commit a million individual in- 
justices to be once roughly just in the general ; 
that the bread we eat and the quiet of the 
family and all that embellishes life and makes 
it worth having have to be purchased by death, 
— by the deaths of animals and the deaths of 
men wearied out with labor, and the deaths of 
those criminals called tyrants and revolution- 
aries, and the deaths of those revolutionaries 
called criminals. It is to something of all this 
that Victor Hugo wishes to open men's eyes 
in ' Les Miserables,' and this moral lesson is 



VICTOR HUGO, THE MAN OF LETTERS 185 

worked out in masterly coincidence with the 
artistic effect,!!^ 7 

If I may venture to supplement Mr. Steven- 
son, I would say that the ethical effects of 
Victor Hugo are largely gained by exagger- 
ation. Mr. Stevenson himself unconsciously 
abets him in this when he says that "our 
laws commit a million injustices to be once 
roughly just in the general." That, I should 
say, is a considerable overstatement. Hugo, 
like Dickens, though in a different way, un- 
derstood the artistic value of overstatement — 
of caricature even. By greatly overdrawing 
some defect of a man's physiognomy you call 
attention to that defect. It must be admitted 
that Hugo's social pictures have this character. 
It is this that makes them effective ; men's 
thoughts are sharply drawn to the oppressions 
of society, to the burdens and sufferings and 
wrongs of the unhappy. Yet the overstate- 
ment in its turn works mischief ; a kind of 
sentimentalism is bred by it which vitiates 
philanthropy ; men come to believe that all 
criminals are made criminals by society, and 
that the woes of the unhappy are purely the 
product of their environment. That senti- 

1 Familiar Studies, p. 42. 



186 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

ment is just as fatal to all sound social recon- 
struction as is the heartless selfishness which 
it rises to denounce. It is by the swinging of 
the pendulum of popular thought from one 
extreme to the other that time is marked and 
progress is made. But whatever the exag- 
geration may be, the motive of this work of 
Hugo's is the highest, and it is by the motive, 
after all, that a man must be judged. 

Hugo thought himself in religion a great 
heretic ; here also, as I have said, he greatly 
exaggerated. What he said about the church 
in those words I just quoted is inspired, of 
course, by the only kind of ecclesiasticism with 
which he was familiar. After all, he is by his 
own frank confession a man of deep religious 
convictions. His belief in God and immor- 
tality was not an esoteric theory ; it was con- 
stantly avowed ; some of his most beautiful 
poems express in glowing words this vital 
faith. Thomas a Kempis himself could not 
confess his dependence on God more humbly 
that Hugo has confessed it in his poem, " Be- 
lieve, but not in Ourselves." 

" God only great, the humble flowrets name ; 
And only true, the mighty floods proclaim ; 
And only good, winds tell from spot to spot. 
O man, let idle vaunts deceive you not. 



VICTOR HUGO, THE MAN OF LETTERS 187 

Whence did you spring, to think that you can be 
Better than God, who made the stars and sea, 
And who awakes you when your rest is done, 
With that prodigious smile of love, the sun ? " l 

In that beautiful little melody " The Grave 
and the Rose " how sweetly he sings the un- 
dying hope : — 

" The Grave said to the Rose 

« What of the dews of dawn, 
Love's flower, what end is theirs ? ' 

* And what of spirits flown, — 
The souls, whereon doth close 

The tomb's mouth unawares ? ' 
The Rose said to the Grave. 

The Rose said, ' In the shade 

From the dawn's tears is made 
A perfume sweet and strange 

Amber and honey-sweet.' 
' And all the spirits fleet 

Do suffer a sky-change, 
More strangely than the dew, 

To God's own angels new,' 
The Grave said to the Rose." 

Was Victor Hugo a Christian ? Not by 
ordinary ecclesiastical definition. Probably 
if you had asked him to accept any credal 
statement about Jesus the Christ he would 

1 Poems, in three volumes : Estes & Lauriat, ii. 90. 



188 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

have refused. But how deep and tender was 
his reverence for the Man of Sorrows ; how 
profound his recognition of the mighty mean- 
ing of the self-sacrifice of the Son of Man, no 
one who reads his books needs to be told. Is 
not his good Bishop Bienvenu meant to be a 
copy of that great Original? Can any one 
forget that scene of the sinking ship in " The 
Man who Laughs/' or the death-bed testimony 
of Jean Valjean ? 

" All at once he rose — such return of 
strength is at times a sequel of the death ag- 
ony. He walked with a firm step to the wall, 
thrust aside Marius and the doctor, who 
wished to help him, detached from the wall the 
small copper crucifix hanging on it, returned 
to his seat with the vigor of full health, and 
said, as he laid the crucifix on the table, t There 
is the Great Martyr, ' " 1 

These lines of his, also, written at the foot 
of a crucifix, how could one who found it in 
his heart to write them have ever imagined 
that his place was outside the great brother- 
hood of Christian believers ? 

" All ye that weep, come unto One who weeps ; 
All ye who suffer, come to One who cures ; 

1 Jean Valjean, ix. v. 



VICTOR HUGO, THE MAN OF LETTERS 189 

All trembling hearts be still ; He pity keeps ; 
All passers-by, oh, tarry ; He endures ! " 1 

The one thing that Jesus Christ brought to 
earth, a great critic has said, was the enthu- 
siasm of humanity. With that passion the 
soul of Victor Hugo was fully dowered, and 
he knew whence it came and reverently con- 
fessed Him. 

No better words than his own can close 
this imperfect estimate : — 

" The human race for four hundred years 
has made no step that was not decisive. We 
enter the great ages. The sixteenth century 
was the century of painters ; the seventeenth 
the century of writers ; the eighteenth the 
century of philosophers ; the nineteenth the 
century of apostles and prophets. To suffice 
for the nineteenth century one must paint as 
in the sixteenth, write as in the seventeenth, 
philosophize as in the eighteenth ; one must 
also possess . . . that fervid religious love 
for humanity which constitutes apostleship 
and which makes man clearly discern the fu- 
ture. In the twentieth century war will be 
dead, the scaffold will be dead, hatred will be 
dead, royalty will be dead, frontier bounda- 

1 Poems, in three volumes, ii. 85. 



190 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

ries will be dead, dogmas will be dead ; man 
will live. He will possess something higher 
than all these, — a great country, the whole 
earth, and a great hope, the whole heaven." * 

1 Victor Hugo, by Alfred Barbou : Shaw's Translation, 
p. 191. 



EICHARD WAGNER, THE 
MUSICIAN 



Just as our master said of Beethoven's grand art that it had 
rescued the human soul from deep degradation, so no artist after 
him has presented this supreme and present spirit of our nation 
as sanctified and strengthened by Christianity, purer and clearer 
than he who had already confessed in early years that he could 
not understand the spirit of Christianity otherwise than as love. 
With " Parsifal " he has created for us a new period of develop- 
ment which is to lead us deeper into our own hearts and to a 
purer humanity. — Louis Nohl. 

The transcendent beauty of the modern drama is lent by the 
ethical idea of salvation through the love of pure woman — a 
salvation of which no one can be in doubt when Tannhauser 
sinks lifeless beside the bier of the atoning saint, and Venus's 
cries of woe are swallowed up by the pious canticle of the re- 
turning pilgrims. — H. E. Krehbid. 




WILHELM RICHARD WAGNER 



RICHARD WAGNER, THE MUSICIAN 

Richard Wagner was born in Leipsic, May 
22, 1813. That was a year before Fichte 
died in Berlin. Victor Hugo was then a 
boy of eleven, at school in Paris. Three of 
our Witnesses of the Light were thus alive 
together on the earth in this year 1813. 
Richard Wagner's death occurred in Venice, 
February 13, 1883 ; three months more would 
have carried him to his seventieth birthday. 
Between these dates are crowded a lifetime 
of tremendous work and many vicissitudes of 
fortune. Through the whole gamut of social 
condition — from gloomiest penury to sunni- 
est prosperity, from heart-breaking isolation 
to a popularity that was almost worship, — 
fortune conducted him. Surely he must have 
known by indubitable experience many of 
those struggles of the soul which he has 
sought to represent to us by means of his 
art. 



194 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

His father was a man of the middle class, 
clerk of the courts when we first know him ; 
probably it was his superior education and 
his knowledge of the French language which 
led Marshal Davoust to commit to him the 
reorganization and control of the police force 
during the French occupation of Leipsic. 

This was just the time, however, when the 
Prussians were making that heroic attempt 
to throw off the French yoke to which Fichte 
so bravely incited them ; and when Richard 
Wagner was six months old that terrible bat- 
tle of Leipsic — the battle of the nations 
— occurred, in which the empire of Napoleon 
received its death wound, and the invader was 
driven back across the Rhine. Doubtless the 
baby in his cradle heard the cannonading of 
that fierce fight. From the carnage of that 
battlefield arose a pestilence, one of whose 
victims was Friedrich Wagner ; and his widow 
with seven children, the eldest of whom was 
but fourteen, and the youngest this baby in 
the cradle, was left in very narrow circum- 
stances, her only reliance being a small pen- 
sion from the government. Nine months 
later the widow was married to Ludwig Geyer, 
an actor of some celebrity, a writer of sue- 



RICHARD WAGNER, THE MUSICIAN 195 

cessf ul comedies, and a portrait painter, who 
had been an old friend of the family. It is 
scarcely to be wondered at that the mother 
of seven children should have been willing to 
accept the protection of a reputable man 
who offered to assume her burdens ; and it 
must have been a loving woman to whom, 
with such encumbrances, a sensible man was 
willing to make such an offer. " Her bright- 
ness and amiability," says Mr. Finck, " ap- 
pear to have made her especially congenial to 
artists, and among those who occasionally 
dropped in for a friendly chat with her was 
not less a personage than Von Weber, the 
creator of the opera ( Der Freischtitz,' which 
first aroused young Richard's musical instincts. 
Throughout his life Richard Wagner referred 
to his mother as ' mein lieber Mutterchen/ 
and at the age of forty-three he told his 
friend Praeger that he could not see a lighted 
Christmas tree without thinking of the kind 
woman, nor prevent the tears starting to his 
eyes when he thought of the unceasing activ- 
ity of that little creature for the comfort and 
welfare of her children. Praeger is doubtless 
right in suggesting that the exquisitely tender 
strains in ' Siegfried/ in which the orchestra 



196 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

accompanies the reference to Siegfried's mo- 
ther, symbolize the love of Wagner for his own 
mother. ' I verily believe/ he says, ' that 
Kichard Wagner never loved any one so 
deeply as his lieber Mutter chen. All his re- 
ferences to her, of his childhood, were of af- 
fection, amounting to idolatry. With that 
instinctive power of unreasoned yet unerring 
perception possessed by women, she from his 
childhood felt the gigantic brain power of the 
boy, and his love for her was not unmixed with 
gratitude for her tacit acknowledgment of his 
genius.' " 1 

It required, indeed, the divination of 
maternal love to recognize this genius, for 
Richard Wagner was no such prodigy as 
Michelangelo or Victor Hugo. He was a 
fairly bright boy, but he was by no means 
precocious, and music was not his first love, 
though he began taking lessons on the piano 
at an early age. No such stories of his musi- 
cal childhood can be told as those with which 
we are familiar in the biographies of Bee- 
thoven and Mozart and Mendelssohn ; even 
Max Miiller, who was only an amateur, gave 
far clearer evidence in his early years of a 

1 Finck's Wagner and his Works, i. 11, 12. 



RICHARD WAGNER, THE MUSICIAN 197 

musical vocation than Kichard Wagner could 
ever have exhibited. 

The family removed to Dresden in his early 
childhood, where his stepfather held a position 
in the Court Theatre, with which also his elder 
brother and sister were connected. From his 
childhood he was thus at home upon the stage. 
The stepfather seems to have been fond of the 
lad and might have helped to shape his career, 
but in Richard's seventh year he died, and the 
mother, with an addition to her brood, was the 
second time a widow. " Shortly before his 
death," Wagner writes, " I had mastered the 
1 Yungferm Kranz/ from i Der Freischutz,' at 
that time a novelty, on the piano. The day 
before he died I had to play it to him in the 
next room ; after I had finished I heard him 
say to my mother in his weak voice : ' Should 
he have a talent for music ? ' The day after 
my stepfather died my mother came into the 
nursery and said something for him to every 
child. To me she said, ' Of you he wanted to 
make something.' I remember," Wagner 
adds, " that for a long time I had an idea that 
something might become of me." 

Although the child was only seven years 
old at the time, the impression made on his 



198 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

mind by these two memorable sayings was un- 
doubtedly permanent and powerful. No man 
can tell how much may result from suggestions 
of this sort, implanted at the right moment 
in a sensitive soul. 

At nine he went to school, but his masters 
thought him an indifferent pupil. He would 
not apply himself to his regular tasks ; his 
mind was too discursive. With his piano 
lessons he did not get on ; he would not prac- 
tice. Yet he learned sonatas, overtures, and 
such like, by the ear, they said ; perhaps he 
always learned music that way, though when 
he came, by and by, to need the knowledge 
of theory and harmony he acquired that with 
resolution and thoroughness ; none of the 
masters knows his musical grammar better 
than Wagner. 

We cannot believe that his school time was 
wholly wasted, for before he was eleven he 
knew Greek well enough to translate into the 
German twelve books of the Odyssey, and 
English well enough to undertake the render- 
ing of one of Romeo's monologues into Ger- 
man verse. Shakespeare, whom he knew best 
in German translations, was at this time of his 
life his hero : he began to imitate him. " I 



RICHARD WAGNER, THE MUSICIAN 199 

projected/' he says, " a grand drama, a sort of 
compound of 6 Hamlet ' and ' King Lear ; ' the 
plan was extremely grandiose ; forty-two per- 
sons died in the course of the piece and in 
developing the plot I found myself compelled 
to make most of them appear as ghosts, be- 
cause otherwise there would have been no per- 
sonages left to reappear in the last acts." 

The boy was a poet ; so much was clear ; 
he reveled in the study of mythology, which 
awakened all the energies of his imaginative 
mind, and he began, at an early day, to write 
verses. On the death of a schoolmate the 
teacher called for rhymed tributes from the 
children of his class ; the best was to be 
printed and Richard Wagner's was selected 
for the purpose. This was his first public 
venture into the field of poesy. 

In his later life he himself recalled his first 
absence from home. It was on the occasion 
of a visit to his uncle Geyer, at Eisleben, the 
birthplace of Luther, who was one of the 
heroes of his youth. "My family," he said, 
" had been among the stanchest Lutherans 
for generations. What attracted me most 
in the great Reformer's character was his 
dauntless energy and fearlessness. Since then 



200 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

I have often ruminated on the true instinct of 
childhood, for I, had I not to preach a new 
gospel of Art ? Had I not also to bear every 
insult in its defense, and had I not too said, 
1 Here I stand ; God help me ! I cannot do 
otherwise.' ' Here is the consecrated purpose 
which makes this life significant to us. In 
some true sense it may be said that the same 
spirit which animated Luther burned in the 
heart of Wagner, — fidelity to the highest 
that he knew ; readiness to suffer the loss of 
all things rather than be false to his ideals. 
It is interesting to find the boy Wagner 
kindling his torch at the great Reformer's fire. 
Wagner's first musical awakening seems to 
have been under the baton of Von Weber ; 
he tells of the awe with which he drew his 
little sister to the window as Weber went by 
to look upon the greatest man in the world. 
But the impression was not lasting, and it was 
not until the family returned from Dresden 
to Leipsic, when he was fifteen years old, that 
he first heard, at a Gewandhaus concert, the 
music of Beethoven. This made a profound 
impression upon him ; the depths of his soul 
were stirred. Writing in after years, he puts 
into the mouth of another words which are 



RICHARD WAGNER, THE MUSICIAN 201 

probably autobiographical : " I knew not what 
I really was intended for. I only remember 
that I heard a symphony of Beethoven one 
evening. After that I fell sick of a fever, 
and when I recovered I was a musician." At 
once he began to think of composition. He 
must know musical theory and counterpoint, 
and he borrowed books and gave himself to 
study. The difficulties were greater far than 
he had imagined, but they only roused his 
energies ; this was a task in which discourage- 
ment was not to be considered ; all his powers 
were now concentrated ; he borrowed from a 
circulating library a book on thorough bass, 
and pored over it in secret until he had ab- 
sorbed the rudiments ; before any one knew 
of the new direction of his mind he had com- 
posed a sonata, a quartette, and an aria. When 
at length the new ambition is confessed, a 
music teacher is employed by the family, but 
here again is apparent failure ; Richard will 
not stick to his exercises in counterpoint ; he 
wants to write overtures for grand opera, 
nothing less. It must be admitted that some- 
thing like what the neurologists call megalo- 
mania is here indicated — a disposition to do 
big things or nothing. It is a symptom which 



202 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

we observed also in Michelangelo and Victor 
Hugo. At sixteen he composed an overture, 
an astonishing composition ; he says himself 
laughingly that Beethoven's Ninth Symphony 
•was a simple and elementary thing by the side 
of this marvelously complicated structure. 
" It was the climax of my absurdities/' says 
Wagner. However, he got the Leipsic or- 
chestra to play it as an entr'acte, and it was 
more successful than he wished, for it set the 
orchestra and the audience all in a roar. It 
was a most useful lesson for the youth; he 
began to see that he was not above the need 
of thorough study, and he was soon again at 
work under a competent master and making 
good use of his time. Mozart and Beethoven 
were the masters he followed ; for the latter 
his admiration was little short of worship. " I 
am doubtful," writes one who was not his 
friend, " whether there ever was a young musi- 
cian more familiar with the work of Beethoven 
than Wagner at eighteen. He possessed most 
of the master's overtures and large instru- 
mental pieces in copies made by himself. He 
went to bed with the sonatas and rose again 
with the quartettes. He sang the songs and 
whistled the concerti, for with pianoforte play- 



BICHARD WAGNER, THE MUSICIAN 203 

ing he did not get on very well ; in short it 
was a true fervor Teutonicus which, in its 
union with an intellect of scientific cultivation 
and unusual activity, promised to yield vigor- 
ous shoots." * 

It must be evident that we have here some- 
thing more than genius ; we have learning, 
culture, of the highest and finest kind. A 
boy of eighteen who has made copies in his 
own handwriting of most of Beethoven's 
masterpieces — who has analyzed them and 
understands them — may be said to have a 
pretty fair musical education. Something more 
than native aptitude for music is in him ; 
his memory is stored with a vast accumula- 
tion of musical lore. 

He begins writing now in good earnest 

o o o 

and produces a few symphonies and overtures 
that still live. At the age of twenty he was 
chorus-master of the theatre of Wurzburg, a 
year later he was director of the theatre at 
Magdeburg, and here the low standards of 
the popular taste and the loose morality of 
his associates began to work considerable de- 
moralization in him ; the fermentations of 
adolescence were not yet past. An opera in 

1 Finck's Wagner f i. 31. 



204 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

two acts, " Das Leibesverbot," an overture to 
Apel's play " Columbus/' and other lesser 
things, came from his pen while here. His 
next halting-place was Konigsberg, where 
Fichte found Kant, and where Wagner found 
his fate in the person of a young actress 
whom he married, thus consigning himself to 
an ill-assorted union with one who could never 
share the best part of his life. Here life gained 
such sweetening as can be given through 
the uses of adversity; for poverty was his 
comrade, and debt drove him at length away 
to Riga, where for a year he was music direc- 
tor, doing indefatigable work, and managing 
to save money enough to pay the debts left 
behind at Konigsberg. 

Now comes the first hegira of Richard 
Wagner. In the summer of 1839, with his 
wife, a big Newfoundland dog, a light purse 
and two acts of his opera "Rienzi" in his 
carpet-bag, he embarks at Pilau on a sailing 
vessel to London. Paris is his objective point ; 
this opera of " Rienzi " will be finished when 
he arrives there, and he expects to have it 
performed at the Grand Opera. We shall all 
admit that this is an intention of the first 
magnitude ; the self-confidence which it re- 



EICHABD WAGNEB, THE MUSICIAN 205 

veals is sublime. It is plain that the young 
man will not fail for lack of assurance. Yet 
it must also be admitted that Wagner was 
probably the only man in the world who at this 
time rightly estimated his own power ; his ex- 
pectation, preposterous as it seemed to every- 
body else, was in the highest degree rational. 
"Rienzi," the poorest of his operas, was not 
accepted at Paris, but, bad as it was, it was 
better than anything which was accepted 
there while he was living in Paris. It would 
have been a great loss to the world if Richard 
Wagner had been less sure of himself. It 
would be poor economy for Providence to 
give a man a big endowment of faculty and 
fail to give him assurance enough to get that 
faculty recognized. 

It was on this stormy voyage through the 
Skagerack and the Cattegat that one pre- 
cious trophy was secured. " The passage 
through the Norwegian fiords, " he says, 
" made a wondrous impression on my fancy ; 
the legend of the Flying Dutchman, as I 
heard it confirmed by the sailors, acquired a 
definite peculiar color which only my adven- 
tures at sea could have given it." Thus was 
lodged in his mind the germ of his second 
great opera. 



206 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

His stay in Paris was prolonged for three 
years, and his life there was a series of bit- 
ter disappointments. He had great hopes of 
many things, but none of them was realized. 
He wrote his " Faust " overture, and the con- 
ductor of the Conservatoire orchestra partly 
promised to bring it out, but finally recalled 
his consent ; he tried to write songs, but no- 
body would buy them ; he sought a place as 
chorus singer in a small theatre, but they 
told him he could not sing. An extract from 
his diary shows the straits to which he was 
brought. 

" I hope that the writing down of my pre- 
vailing moods, and the reflection springing 
from them, will afford me relief as tears do to a 
heart oppressed. Tears have come into my 
eyes unbidden at this moment ; is it a proof 
of cowardice or of unhappiness to yield will- 
ingly to tears? A young German journey- 
man was here ; he was in poor health, and I 
bade him come again for his breakfast. Minna 
took the occasion to tell me that she was about 
to send away our last pennies for bread. You 
poor woman — right you are ! our situation is 
a sad one ; and if I reflect upon it I can fore- 
see with certainty that the greatest conceivable 



RICHARD WAGNER, THE MUSICIAN 207 

misery is in store for us; an accident only 
can bring improvement, for an accident I must 
almost consider the contingency of being 
helped by others voluntarily and without any 
personal interest." 

He had many friends who seemed to value 
his talents but who were too busy to give him 
any practical aid. Meyerbeer, Berlioz, Hale vy, 
Scribe, Vieuxtemps, and the Germans, Laube 
and Heine, were all numbered among his ac- 
quaintances, but even with such endorsement 
as they could give him, Richard Wagner, in 
his twenty-eighth year, was nigh to starvation. 
At length a music publisher found him work 
to do reading proof and arranging popular 
melodies and operatic airs for the piano and 
other instruments, not excluding even the cor- 
net. What work was this for the author of 
" Tannhauser " and " Parsifal ! " But it gave 
him bread; it kept him, perhaps, from self- 
destruction, to which he confesses that he was 
tempted. 

Yet this stay in Paris was not wasted time. 
What good stuff was in him this experience 
revealed, for it was in this time of testing that 
his ideals were clarified and his highest pur- 
poses confirmed. During these three years in 



208 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

the French capital, he finished his " Rienzi," 
and wrote the "Flying Dutchman." Paris 
had .no use for any of this work ; he began to 
correspond with friends in Dresden and to his 
great delight his " Rienzi " was accepted there. 
In the spring of 1842 he turned his steps 
homeward with a great wish to do something 
for the art and the people of his native country. 
" For the first time," he says, " I saw the 
Rhine ; with tears in my eyes, I, the poor 
artist, swore allegiance to the German Father- 
land." 

" Rienzi," crude as it was, was brilliantly 
successful both in Dresden and at Berlin ; 
" Der Fliegende Hollander," a far more poeti- 
cal and original work, was much less favorably 
received, simply because it was more poetical 
and original. It is in this work that Wagner 
first takes deep counsel with himself concern- 
ing his art. Instead of asking what is fash- 
ionable and popular, he simply asks what is 
true and beautiful. He is beginning the same 
fight in musical art in which Hugo enlisted in 
behalf of a better method in literature ; and 
it is to be a long and bitter warfare. It is 
romanticism against classicism, it is the new 
theology against the old orthodoxy, it is liberal- 



RICHARD WAGXER. THE MUSICIAN 209 

ism against conservatism, it is the age-long 
struggle of life to break through the crust of 

on © 

conventions and find new forms of fruitfulness 

and beauty. There is always something to 

say on both sides of this question ; there is 

always good in the old to be conserved, and 

there is often much that is crude and flighty 

in the militant innovations ; but even when it 

is true of the innovator, as it was of Wagner, 

that there is full recognition of value in the 

old forms, and only desire to supplement and 

vitalize them with fresh growths, a stupid 

conservatism often rages against this laudable 
© © 

endeavor and determines to crush out every 

suggestion of change. 

©o © 

This is the kind of antagonism which 
Wagner now finds confronting him. and to 
which, from this hour, he makes no conces- 
sions ; hitherto he has yielded, somewhat, to 
the demands of fashion ; now he has his own 
ideas of what good music is, and he will be 
true to his own conceptions. 

He has, indeed, won recognition for his 
genius ; nobody questions that he is a true 
musician, and the honorable position of Royal 
Conductor of the Dresden Opera is now 
granted him, which he holds for six years. 



210 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

The fruit of this period is " Tannhauser " 
and "Lohengrin/' the first of which is here 
performed under his direction, and the second 
of which is compelled to wait for a long time 
before it sees the light. 

The popular reception given to " Tannhau- 
ser " seems to have been enthusiastic enough 
at the outset, but the critics would none of it. 
The press was bitterly hostile, for reasons 
which, at this distance, do not seem entirely 
adequate. There was great lack of hilarity, 
these gentlemen affirmed, in the story ; the 
third act was particularly devoid of interest, 
and the failure of the artist to bring about a 
matrimonial alliance at the end between Tann- 
hauser and Elizabeth appeared to them inex- 
cusable. The clear word of Kobert Schu- 
mann, applauding the beauty of the opera, 
was a voice crying in the wilderness. 

The temper of the times, as revealed in the 
onslaught upon " Tannhauser," which banished 
it from the stage and entailed upon Wagner 
severe financial losses, embittered him, and 
drove him into the ranks of the revolution- 
aries. This was in 1845, the uprising of 
'48 and '49 was simmering, and Wagner be- 
gan to feel that the day had come for a com- 



RICHARD WAGNER, THE MUSICIAN 211 

plete social change. He did not think that 
art could breathe in that stifling atmosphere ; 
a thunderstorm must clear the air. Two 
pamphlets written during this period indicate 
the vital relation between his passion for art 
and his political ideas. The loftiness of his 
aims must be confessed. He thought that the 
theatre and the opera ought to do something 
more for the people than merely to furnish 
them with diversion ; they ought to be in the 
highest sense educational and inspirational. 
The Emperor Joseph's maxim he prints in 
large letters in one of these pamphlets, — 
" The theatre should have no other object 
than to assist in the refinement of taste and 
morals." The suggestions of his pamphlet 
on the national drama are radical enough ; he 
wants its management placed in the hands of 
competent specialists ; he wants dramatic and 
musical schools established for the training 
of artists ; he wants the music of the churches 
reformed at the same time, and the whole 
administration of opera and theatre placed 
under the authority of the minister of public 
worship. 

It was because the standards and aims of 
the stage, on the musical side as well as on 



212 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

the theatrical side, were so low, — because 
the Philistinism of the period fought so bit- 
terly against any elevation of its perform- 
ances, that Wagner became a revolutionist. 
In the uprising of the Dresden populace for 
republicanism he fired rockets, rang alarm 
bells, wrote pamphlets, made speeches ; whether 
he fought at the barricades is not certain, but 
he stood on the watch-towers and welcomed 
the reinforcements from the villages who came 
in to assist the insurrectionists. 

How much better off Wagner would have 
been if the revolution had been successful I 
cannot say ; it is not so certain that the sub- 
stitution of a commercial for a political feudal- 
ism would have greatly liberated art. Indeed, 
it is evident that Wagner's liberalism would 
never have marched far with that of his com- 
patriots ; for when he came to think out his 
scheme for the reorganization of society he 
found that monarchy — a hereditary mon- 
archy — was an essential element in it. 
" Wagner," says Mr. Lidgey, " believed in 
Kingship as the fundamental principle of gov- 
ernment ; but in this belief his desire for revo- 
lution was retrogressive, and coupled with a 
strong qualification. The king must be su- 



RICHARD WAGNER, THE MUSICIAN 213 

preme, but he must rule, first, directly, sec- 
ondly, over a free people. Wagner's ideal of 
life was the Family. In the family the father 
is head, his supremacy is unquestioned, all the 
other members render him implicit obedience. 
Why ? Because all are united by the supreme 
bond of Love. Their actions are dictated by 
no selfish spirit, no self-interest mars the happy 
union ; each member is free, and his obedience 
(which is dictated only by Love) to the head 
of the little community necessarily results 
in the mutual well-being, seeing that it is 
prompted by the one dominant feeling of 
community of interest." ! The idyllic un- 
worldliness of this political programme was 
not, probably, the kind of thing that most of 
the people of the barricades had set their 
hearts upon. It was the kingdom of heaven 
which he proposed to establish on earth, with- 
out waiting for any. The ideal is high enough. 
He wanted a free field for the human spirit ; 
and with all that was visionary he clearly saw 
what none of us must fail to see, that no single 
section of human life can be reformed without 
the reformation of the whole ; that art and 
literature and education and religion are all 

1 Wagner, by C. A. Lidgey, p. 82. 



214 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

affected by the prevailing social and political 
conditions, and that the remedy for their ail- 
ments must spring from a freer and healthier 
life in the whole people. 

This revolutionary uprising was quickly put 
down by Prussian bayonets, and in the spring 
of '49 Wagner was forced to flee, first to 
Weimar, where Liszt sheltered him for a little, 
and thence to Zurich, where for more than nine 
years he made his home. It was not till 1861 
that he was permitted to return to his own 
country. His exile was less prolonged than 
that of Dante, but hardly less flagrantly un- 
just; for Richard Wagner was German to his 
finger-tips, and from revolutionaries of his 
type the throne had not much to fear. 

I cannot follow his career through the vicis- 
situdes of these memorable years. Most of 
the time he was in great poverty, kept from 
starving by the kindness of his friends, chief 
of whom was Franz Liszt, between whom and 
Wagner a most noble and beautiful affection 
existed. To the friendship of this magnani- 
mous soul Wagner owed a debt unspeakable, 
and he was not unmindful of the obligation. 

It was during these years of exile that he 
wrote " Tristan und Isolde," " Die Meister- 



RICHARD WAGNER, THE MUSICIAN 215 

singer von Niirnberg," and a considerable por- 
tion of his great tetralogy, " The Nibelungen 
Ring " ; it was in Zurich also that he pro- 
duced his important literary works, in which 
he develops his ideas of art. In 1861, by 
the intercession of friends, his political of- 
fenses were pardoned, and he was permitted 
after an absence of twelve years to return to 
his native country. In 1864 the romantic 
young King of Bavaria called him to his side 
and undertook to be his munificent patron ; 
there were great plans for a new theatre at 
Munich, and magnificent interpretations of 
Wagner's chief works, but court intrigues and 
violent popular opposition interrupted these 
schemes, and Wagner threw himself upon the 
generosity of the German people, hoping by 
subscriptions and concerts to obtain the money 
necessary for the erection of the theatre in 
which his works could be adequately rendered 
under his own direction. The beautiful old 
city of Bayreuth was selected as the site of 
this building, and after much tribulation the 
building was completed, King Ludwig coming 
to the rescue with a generous subvention. 
Here his great tetralogy was finished and per- 
formed under his own direction ; the old city 



216 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

became a Mecca to which pilgrimages from 
the whole world were made, and finally, his 
sacred drama " Parsifal " was written and sol- 
emnly celebrated, the consecration and crown 
of his life-work. On February 13, 1883, in 
his temporary home on the Grand Canal in 
Venice, his end suddenly came. His body 
was buried in the grounds of his own house 
at Bayreuth — Wahnf ried ; the ivy-covered 
grave is unmarked by carven slab or obelisk ; 
if you wish to see his monument look about 
you ; the city is forever identified with his 
name. 

To estimate, in any adequate way, the ser- 
vices rendered to art by this great master 
would be a serious task. Of the technical 
questions involved I must not try to speak, 
further than to say that Wagner's conceptions 
of musical form are the development of ideas 
struck out by Beethoven and Yon Weber 
and Schumann. From him we have gained 
a new definition of melody. It is not with 
him a dance tune, in which the phrases are 
rhythmically symmetrical ; it flows on without 
pausing and returning upon itself. It is not 
Long Meter nor Hallelujah Meter, nor 8s and 
7s, nor any of their combinations ; it wanders 



RICHARD WAGNER, THE MUSICIAN 217 

at its own sweet will, and comes round to its 
cadences when it pleases. This feature of his 
composition was, perhaps, at the outset, as 
much of a stumbling-block to the ordinary lis- 
tener as anything else in Wagner's music. 
Wagner maintains that the adherence to the 
dance measures characterizes the childhood of 
musical art. Melody, as he conceives it, is 
less artificial. It should produce upon the 
spirit of the listener an effect " like that 
which a beautiful forest produces, on a summer 
evening, upon a lonely wanderer, who has but 
just left the town, . . . and who listens ever 
more keenly as one who hears with new senses 
and becomes with every moment more dis- 
tinctly conscious of endlessly varied voices 
that are abroad in the forest. New and vari- 
ous ones constantly join, — such as he never 
remembers to have heard before ; and as they 
multiply in numbers they increase in mysteri- 
ous power. They grow louder and louder, 
and so many are the voices, the separate tunes, 
he hears, that the whole strong, clear-swelling 
music seems to him only the great forest 
melody that enchained him with awe at the 
beginning." 1 One needs to become accus- 

1 Art Life and Theories of Richard Wagner, translated by 
Edward L. Burlingame, p. 182. 



218 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

tomed to Wagner's way of saying things, as 
to Carlyle's way, or Burne Jones's way ; but 
when our minds are adjusted to his manner 
we find it most stimulating and refreshing. 

The doctrine of the fellowship of the arts 
was one on which Wagner placed the strong- 
est emphasis. In his music-dramas — for he 
would not call them operas — poetry, paint- 
ing, action, and music must all be harmoni- 
ously blended. 

The Italian opera of fifty years ago, as some 
of us can remember, had sunk into an abyss of 
artificial puerility. It was a conventional tra- 
peze, on which musical artists performed for 
audiences who thought themselves too culti- 
vated to go to the circus. The structure of the 
opera was to the last degree artificial ; as a 
drama it was ludicrous ; the action was subor- 
dinated in the most laughable ways to vocal 
exigencies ; the poetry was drivel ; the whole 
thing was a contrivance for the exhibition of 
the vocal powers of a few astonishing singers. 
As Voltaire said : " What is too silly for speech 
they sing." Wagner's first principle is that the 
poetry and the music must be organically 
united ; that the poetry is not a set of wooden 
pegs on which musical draperies may be hung ; 



RICHARD WAGNER, THE MUSICIAN 219 

that the purpose of the music is simply to give 
adequate expression to the thought and feel- 
ing which the words contain. The poetry is 
first, out of this the melody must naturally 
spring. It was a strong way of putting it when 
Wagner used to liken poetry to a husband and 
music to a wife, observing at the same time 
that he did not believe in " woman's rights ; " 
maintaining that, in the music-drama, at any 
rate, the poetry should never be subordinated 
to the music. There may, however, be a deeper 
truth here than Wagner himself divined ; for 
the Christian doctrine, in which he so pro- 
foundly believed, that self -surrender is con- 
quest and mastery, is revealed in the right 
relation of the sexes. The very subordination 
of the feminine music, whose predominant 
element is feeling, to the masculine poetry, 
whose predominant element is thought, is pre- 
cisely what gives the music power over human 
hearts. She stoops to conquer. 

With Wagner, however, the union of the 
two was complete ; the twain were one. The 
poems of his music-dramas were written by 
himself, and words and melodies were born 
together. The words, as he wrote them, 
immediately clothed themselves in musical 



220 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

phrases which he did not forget. " It is not 
my way/' he said, " to choose a certain sub- 
ject, elaborate it into verse, and then cogi- 
tate music suitable to go with it. Such a 
method would indeed subject me to the dis- 
advantage of having to be inspired twice by 
the same subject, which is impossible. . . . 
Before I begin to make a verse, or even to 
project a scene, I am already intoxicated by 
the musical fragrance of my task. I have all 
the tones, all the characteristic motives, in 
my head, so that when the verses are com- 
pleted and the scenes arranged, the opera is 
practically finished, so far as I am concerned, 
and the detailed execution of the work is lit- 
tle more than a quiet after labor which has 
been preceded by the real moments of crea- 
tion." x Of the " Siegfried " he said : " The 
musical phrases fit themselves on to the verses 
and periods without any trouble on my 
part; everything grows as if wild from the 
ground." 2 

We have here a conception of these related 
arts which ought to be instructive. The great- 
est modern master of music did not despise 

1 Quoted in Finck's Wagner and his Works, ii. 24. 

2 Ibid. p. 26. 



EICRARD WAGNER, THE MUSICIAN 221 

poetry. That he could not well afford to do, 
for he was no mean poet. He felt that music 
derived its dignity, its significance, its power 
of impression, very largely from the poetry 
with which it was united. It is a question, 
indeed, whether he did not undervalue abso- 
lute music ; but this must be conceded, that 
when poetry and music are joined together, 
music must not be degraded by wedding it to 
silly words, and poetry must not be treated 
with contempt in the " artistic " rendering of 
the music. That is a truth which fits the 
church quite as well as the theatre ; and it is 
greatly to be wished that singers of hymns 
and anthems, as well as singers of operatic 
arias, would constantly bear it in mind. 

The great service of Wagner was, how- 
ever, the elevation of the whole conception of 
the music-drama. I have quoted already what 
he said about this in his pamphlet published 
before his exile. He felt that the drama, 
whether accompanied by music or not, ought 
to be a source of refinement and moral in- 
vigoration ; that it ought to suggest great 
thoughts and hold up high ideals. The drama 
was to him the queen of the arts, because it 
gathered into its high service architecture, 



222 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

painting, poetry, and music, presenting also 
in its living pictures the beauty at which sculp- 
ture aims. It must spring from the life of the 
people ; and it must reflect and criticise and 
idealize the life of the people ; its function is 
therefore an exalted and even a sacred one. 
He thought that the whole performance 
ought, for this reason, to be dignified and 
serious ; that the business of the artists was 
not to make a spectacle of themselves, but to 
represent the drama. 

Far beyond this, his dramas themselves 
grapple with the great themes of the spiritual 
life. Their subjects are generally legendary 
or mythical, because he believed that the ideal 
was the field of the music-drama, and that 
personalities which were symbols, rather than 
historic individuals, were most serviceable. In 
all these stories, however, as he tells them, 
deep ethical laws are found working them- 
selves out ; sin and its consequences, — the 
retributions of violated law, and redemption 
through suffering and self-sacrifice, — these 
great religious ideas are presented, over and 
over, with tremendous power. 

Thus in the four great dramas of the " Nibe- 
lungen King," the tragedy which binds all 



BICHABD WAGNEB, THE MUSICIAN 223 

together in sorrow and fear and impending 
doom is the theft of the Rhine gold. It lies 
there in splendor at the bottom of the river ; 
the merry Rhine daughters guard it ; it is 
known that the possession of it will confer 
magical power, but it is also known that he 
who obtains it must renounce love. In this 
happy time of innocence no one wants to part 
with love for the sake of getting gold. But 
Alberich the dwarf makes that sacrifice, and 
Wotan, the father of the gods, is not only un- 
willing that he should have the gold on ac- 
count of the power it bestows, but is also 
eager to get it to help himself out of a bad 
bargain with the giants, and therefore employs 
craft and violence to get it away from the 
dwarf. Thus into this primeval world come 
covetousness and deceit and murder and all 
the woes that follow in their train. The ac- 
cursed thirst for gold brings curse and ruin 
after it. The father of the gods himself is 
doomed by the greed which has instigated 
him to gain possession of it ; he is compelled 
by the fatal complications in which he has be- 
come involved to surrender it to the giants 
and they are destroyed by it. " Wotan him- 
self," if I may adopt Hueffer's short summary, 



224 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

" is debarred by his promise from wrenching 
it from the enemy's grasp. This can only be 
done by the god-inspired action of a hero, who, 
by his own free impulse, and regardless of 
law, human or divine, shall restore the treasure 
to the depth of the Rhine. This idea of the 
world-redeeming power of free impulse, one 
might almost say of heroism, in Carlyle's 
sense, is the grand background on which the 
human events of this trilogy are inflicted ; it 
is a tragic idea because the individual in this 
ideal strife must perish. In this sense Sieg- 
mund and Sieglinde, Siegfried and Briinhilde, 
become representatives of that pure fire of 
human aspiration which cannot be quenched 
by misfortune. They are crushed by a blind 
fate, but the essence of their being remains 
untouched by its strokes ; they die, but they 
conquer." 

There is much dispute about the meaning 
of Wagner's mythological parables; the ex- 
positors are not at one over the "Nibelun- 
gen Ring " any more than over the "Apoca- 
lypse," but no one can doubt that he is 
seriously grappling with the great questions of 
life and destiny. 



RICHARD WAGNER, THE MUSICIAN 225 

In several of his dramas redemption is 
wrought by the self-sacrificing love of woman ; 
it is the voluntary death of Senta which re- 
leases the fated Dutchman from his doom of 
deathless wandering ; it is the love of Eliza- 
beth, dying with a prayer on her lips for the 
wayward Tannhauser, that subdues and saves 
him. Thus she prays for him, when he is peni- 
tent : — 

" Oh, see him meekly bending-, 

Thou God of love and grace, 
Forgive thou his offending, 

And all his guilt efface ; 
For him I bend before thee, 

My life a prayer shall be, 
Make him, oh, I implore thee, 

From sin and sorrow free. 
Oh, gladly would I render 

My life for his the price, 
For him, O Lord, I tender 

My own as sacrifice." 

These were strange words to hear upon the 
operatic stage when they were first sung there, 
a little more than half a century ago, — not 
much like the librettos of your " Traviatas " 
and your " Tro vat ores." 

Not all Wagner's music-dramas are as 
deeply religious as " Tannhauser ; " " Die 
Meistersinger " is pure comedy, and " Tristan 



226 WITNESSES OF TEE LIGHT 

und Isolde " is a love tragedy ; but Krehbiel 
says truly that those of his dramas which, like 
the Greek tragedies, are based on legendary 
or mythical tales, are largely expositions of 
the idea which lies at the bottom of the great 
poems and dramas of Germany — " the idea 
that salvation comes to humanity through the 
self-sacrificing love of woman." In truth, 
however, it is because he believes that the na- 
ture of woman, like the nature of music, finds 
its glory and power in self -surrender, that his 
dramas ascribe the work of redemption so 
largely to woman. It is the Christ-idea with 
which his thought is saturated. If woman, in 
most of his dramas, is the representative of 
this idea, it is because he thinks that she 
most perfectly represents it. 

In the last, and in some respects the great- 
est, as it is far the most deeply religious of 
his dramas, — " Parsifal," — the redeeming 
work is wrought by a man. In no other work 
of dramatic art has there been such a seri- 
ous attempt to incarnate the Christ-idea as in 
" Parsifal." Far back in the Dresden days he 
sketched a drama, " Jesus of Nazareth ; " it 
was well that he waited until his riper years 
and chose for the second character a form of 



BICHABD WAGNER, THE MUSICIAN 227 

representation somewhat less bold. The mo- 
tive of " Parsifal " is as religious as that of 
the miracle plays of the Middle Ages. It is 
not only a music-drama ; the untranslatable 
name which he gave it, " Buhnenweihf est- 
spiel," means, pretty nearly, " Sacred Festival 
Drama." 

The whole tragedy of sin and punishment 
and redemption is here. Amfortas, King of 
the Holy Grail and custodian of the Sacred 
Spear, has been tempted and has fallen ; the 
weapon which made him invincible has been 
turned against him, inflicting a remediless 
wound from which he must languish until a 
redeemer shall recover the spear and heal the 
hurt with its redeeming touch. Sorrow and 
desolation have fallen upon the whole realm 
on account of this transgression ; the disobe- 
dience of one brings misery to many. In the 
midst of this troubled scene appears Parsifal, 
a pure innocent, who is profoundly stirred by 
the king's suffering, but departs, apparently 
unconscious of his mission. In the country 
of Klingsor's enchanted castle he wanders, 
and here, by the same temptress before whose 
wiles the king had fallen, he is subjected to a 
terrible temptation, which he resists and con- 



228 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

quers. In this struggle with the evil his whole 
nature is aroused ; by the swift intuition of 
sympathy he discerns the meaning of the 
conflict in which the king was worsted; his 
heart thrills with pity for him ; he longs to 
save him. His victory over the evil, bought 
with so much struggle and suffering, makes 
him a captain of salvation. Because he him- 
self has suffered, being tempted, he is able to 
succor them that are tempted. He is no 
longer the pure fool ; he has learned in the 
school of temptation the deepest lore of the 
spirit. The temptress herself is humbled and 
saved by his resistance, and when the demon 
Klingsor flings at him the sacred spear, it 
hangs harmless in the air above his head and 
he seizes it and by it is made invincible. Re- 
turning with it to the country of the Grail, 
he heals the king's wound by a touch and de- 
livers the nation from all its distresses. 

If you wish for Wagner's interpretation of 
the mystery, take it in his own words : " In 
Parsifal the sufferings of the redeemer himself 
are the saving power, and at the same time 
the incorporation of that Ideal which the love- 
curse has taken from the saintly ones of the 
Grail Temple. Parsifal has attained unto the 



BICHARD WAGNER, THE MUSICIAN 229 

recognition of the sacrificial wounds of Christ, 
and preserving this recognition in his love of 
the being of his own purity, rescues the fatal 
spear that pierced the Saviour's side from the 
power of heathendom, and in conscious, com- 
passionate sympathy heals with it the ever- 
bleeding wounds caused by the love-guiltiness 
of the deluded Grail King." 

The costume of the mediaeval legend is of 
course preserved, and much of the symbolism 
presents ideas which do not represent the con- 
ceptions of modern theology ; but through it 
all these great truths shine out so clearly that 
the wayfaring man, though a fool, cannot miss 
them : that sin brings suffering and weakness 
and moral helplessness upon the sinner ; that 
from this doom he can be rescued only by 
one who will suffer with him, identifying him- 
self with the sinner, and sharing his woes. 
There is not a hint of legal substitution in this 
redemption ; the vicariousness is purely moral. 

When this drama was first enacted at Bay- 
reuth a critic said : " So deeply reverent was 
the spirit of all the performers that the re- 
mark was made by many that the last scene of 
the first act was the most impressive religious 
service they had ever attended." No one who 



230 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

has seen it at Bayreuth, where alone it is given, 
would hesitate to offer the same testimony. It 
is a reverent company that witnesses it; no 
applause is ever tolerated ; every one feels 
that it would be a profanation; in silence, 
broken only by deep breathing, the solemn 
scenes of the first and last acts proceed ; every 
heart that is capable of reverential emotion 
is conscious that the great motives of the 
drama of redemption are here visibly set forth. 
And any one who can pass directly, as it was 
once my privilege to pass, from the Grand 
Opera at Paris, with its troops of claqueurs, its 
ballet injected into the heart of Gounod's 
" Faust/' its vocal gymnastics and its clamor- 
ous calls before the curtain at the end of the 
scene of those who had but lately expired in 
our presence, — to the quiet country hill-top of 
Bayreuth with its darkened room, its absence 
of tinsel and glare, its quietly dressed and de- 
corous assemblies, listening in hushed atten- 
tion to the solemn music of "Parsifal," — 
would get a vivid impression of what has been 
done for the musical drama by the genius of 
Eichard Wagner. 

It is not to be imagined that all Wagner's 
musical dramas rise to this height, but this 



RICHARD WAGNER, THE MUSICIAN 231 

much must be said : first, that he and no one 
else has lifted the lyric stage up to a posi- 
tion in which work of this kind can be pre- 
sented upon it ; and secondly, that his entire 
production is alive with ethical and spirit- 
ual conceptions. Whatever else may be said 
of Richard Wagner, he is surely a great wit- 
ness to the reality of the deepest truths of 
morality and religion. " It is impossible/' 
says Mr. Lid gey, " to study Wagner's works 
without being struck by the singularly deep 
religious feeling by which they are pervaded. 
The broad basis of his religion was the emanci- 
pation of the human race ; this was his con- 
ception of ' the fulfillment of the pure doctrine 
of Christ.' To him the doctrine that Jesus 
preached was Love, and in his earnest desire 
to arrive at the rock of truth in religious life 
and art, we cannot wonder that he felt little 
or no sympathy with those who seemed to him 
to have obscured that precious truth with 
clouds of arbitrary and ostentatious dogma, 
designed to further the worldly interests of 
priesthood." 1 If we sometimes hear him 
speaking with contempt of Christianity, we 
must remember that it is the formal and official 

1 Wagner, by C. A. Lidgey, p. 85. 



232 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

and not the essential Christianity at which his 
diatribes are directed. Upon the vital ele- 
ments of the doctrine of Christ his art laid 
firm hold, it clothed them with the beauty of 
glorious music, and it will share their immor- 
tality. It is a great fact that the music- 
dramas of Wagner to-day dominate the lyric 
stage. What a mighty impulse this one man 
has thus given to the elevation and purifica- 
tion of this branch of dramatic art ! If some 
one would do for the spoken drama what 
Wagner has done for the drama that is sung, 
the world would have deep reasons for thanks- 
giving. 

Richard Wagner was not a saint. His 
temper was stormy ; of tact he was destitute ; 
he was absorbed in his own creations, and 
often rather oblivious of the interests of 
others ; respecting money matters his senti- 
ments were chivalrous, but his habits were 
reckless. Upon some of the episodes of his 
life one does not care to dwell ; only the 
omniscient can be judges. But over against 
these failings we may place first his genuine 
democracy. To the gondolier or the cabman 
he was as courteous as to the king, and his 
servants worshiped him. To every living 



RICHARD WAGNER, THE MUSICIAN 233 

creature his heart went out with compassion ; 
there are many stories of kindness to dumb 
animals ; his faithful dog Russ lies buried 
near him at Wahnfried. To his friends he 
was the soul of loyalty, and there were hosts 
of them whose devotion to him amounted to 
a passion. 

If any one is disposed to deny that he was 
the greatest musician of history, that issue 
may well be left to the future. His work, 
like that of most of the great makers, is of 
uneven value; but when the ages to come 
shall have sifted the chaff from the wheat, it 
may appear that the largest and the best con- 
tribution to the world's store of great music 
at the end of the nineteenth century was the 
contribution of Richard Wagner. 

How precious is the gift and how perma- 
nent ! Paint will fade and marble crumble, 
but there seems to be no reason why the cre- 
ations of musical art should not be just as 
fresh and perfect a thousand years from to- 
day as they are to-day. Bach and Beethoven 
as composers are not wrinkled and gray- 
headed ; their music is as young to-day as 
when it was written, and the perfection of in- 
struments and of technique enables us to re- 



234 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

produce it in a form far more perfect than 
ever they heard it on earth. One listens 
to Paderewski or Aus der Ohe playing one 
of Beethoven's sonatas, or to the orchestra 
under Seidl or Gericke rendering one of his 
symphonies with a great longing that the 
master could come back to earth and with 
ears unstopped listen to his own music as we 
can hear it, — how much more magnificent 
than anything that ever greeted his ears while 
he was in the flesh ! It is a foolish wish, no 
doubt, for they are playing it better, I hope, 
where he is now. And I am sure that there 
can never be a heaven too bright or too 
happy for the Sonata Appassionata or the 
Ninth Symphony, and no choir of angels that 
will not delight to sing the Pilgrims' Chorus 
and the Music of the Grail. 

How wonderful it seems that the hand 
which now lies mouldering in the sepulchre 
at Wahnfried has bestowed on us so many 
and so precious gifts that we can cherish 
forever ; has woven out of pure thought 
an imperishable fabric of sweet sound, com- 
mitting it to signs that are imperishable and 
memorable, — so that the mind and will of 
man, taking the cue thus given, can summon 



RICHARD WAGNER, THE MUSICIAN 235 

at any time from the heavenly heights the 
same harmonious throng; can thrill the air 
of any grove or temple with the same ravish- 
ing vibrations ! By how many firesides, in 
how many stately halls, are the strains re- 
sounding to-night which this singer first 
heard and recorded — strains of quick sug- 
gestion, of uplifting thought, of ennobling 
impulse ! 

Thanks and praise to the master who has 
bequeathed to us a treasure as enduring as 
time, — yea, a treasure that shall outlast 
time ; that memory shall forge into a golden 
chain, binding the beauty of earth to the 
glory of heaven ! 



VI 
RUSKIN, THE PREACHER 



The religious tone of his art treatment in " Modern Painters," 
is not due to a general orthodox recognition of the divine supremacy 
in the order of the world, still less is it to be regarded as a liter- 
ary expression of youthful piety. It is the first deliberate and 
philosophic statement of that doctrine of theocratic government 
of nature and of human life, which remained a fixed principle in 
all his work, and which we shall perceive as dominating his con- 
ception of a sound social order. There is, indeed, a stern enthu- 
siasm in his early statement of this creed, which bears the marks 
of his Calvinist ancestry, and sometimes reminds ns of that 
famous Scottish document, the " Shorter Catechism." " Man's 
use and function (and let who will not grant me this follow me 
no further, for this I purpose always to assume) is to be the wit- 
ness of the glory of God and to advance that glory by his reason- 
able obedience and resultant happiness." — John A. Hobson. 




JOHN RUSKIN 



VI 

BUSKIN, THE PREACHER 

John Ruskin was born on the 8th of Feb- 
ruary, 1819, in the heart of London. That 
•was a notable year. Charles Kingsley, Walt 
Whitman, James Russell Lowell, and Queen 
Victoria were among those whom it gave to 
the world. George III. was living yet, but 
not reigning, and the author of the Monroe 
doctrine was President of the United States. 

John Ruskin's family was Scotch ; his father, 
John James Ruskin, was born in Edinburgh, 
and educated after the approved classical 
methods in the famous old High School of that 
city under Dr. Adam, the most distinguished 
of Scottish schoolmasters. In his young man- 
hood he went to London to seek his for- 
tune, and by dint of clear integrity and strong 
business sense succeeded in winning his way 
to the head of an important house in the wine 
trade. The kind of stuff of which John James 
Ruskin was made is indicated by a single fact. 



240 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

Just as he was setting up for himself, his 
father failed in business with a heavy indebted- 
ness, but the son insisted on assuming all the 
obligations and devoted nine years of most 
strenuous labor to paying off those old scores 
before he ever put by a penny of his own — 
deferring his marriage, also, until this stain 
upon the honor of the family could be wholly 
wiped away. It was not, therefore, until he 
was thirty-four that he was able to claim his 
cousin, Margaret Cox, who had waited for him 
all this time and would have waited longer ; 
he carried her away from Edinburgh to the 
home that he had provided for her in Bruns- 
wick Square, London, and there their only 
child was born. "An entirely honest mer- 
chant," is the inscription which John Ruskin 
caused to be cut upon his father's tombstone ; 
and a man as entirely veracious as John Rus- 
kin would not have put it there if it had not 
been true. Many of us, I dare say, are not 
in the habit of associating high character with 
the traffic in which John James Ruskin was 
engaged ; but there is abundant evidence that 
this man was upright and honorable ; his 
mind, also, was finely cultivated; he was a 
lover and a constant reader of good books ; he 



BUSKIN, THE PREACHER 241 

was a connoisseur in pictures and a buyer of 
them, too. In all these refined tastes his wife 
was at one with him ; perhaps hers was rather 
the stronger nature. Mr. Ruskin says : "My 
father had the exceedingly bad habit of yield- 
ing to my mother in large things, and taking 
his own way in little ones." 1 The Spartan 
regimen of the household was mainly due to 
Mrs. Ruskin ; the artistic ameliorations of its 
severities mainly to her husband. After John 
was four years old the family removed to 
Heme Hill, in Dulwich, south of the Thames, 
and the manner of their life there is well pre- 
served fpr us by Mr. Ruskin in " Praeterita." 
The Ruskins had few associates ; zealous Low 
Church people as they were, they never were 
absent from church on Sunday, but that was 
almost their only social contact with the world 
outside their garden walls. Evenings, after 
dinner, were devoted to reading ; John was 
bestowed, like one of Raphael's cherubs, upon 
a seat in a little niche in the wall on one side 
of the chimney, and a writing table penned 
him in and held his plate and cup or the book 
he might be reading ; he made no trouble and 
caused no interruption to the pleasure of his 

1 Prceterita. i. 17. 



242 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

parents : quite too well trained was he for that. 
It was a household in which the child was not 
spoiled by sparing the rod. He was whipped 
if he cried ; he was whipped for carelessness 
if he fell down stairs : it was heroic discipline 
through which the child was carried; the 
severity, to modern judgment, seems excessive. 
It is an open question, however, whether 
modern judgment on this matter is much more 
sane ; whether it has not traveled quite as far 
in the opposite direction. 

Little John Kuskin, perched in his niche, 
and leaning in the lamplight on his table, 
heard much good literature, and learned to 
enjoy much of what he heard. " My father," 
he says, " was an absolutely beautiful reader 
of the best poetry and prose, — of Shake- 
speare, Pope, Spenser, Byron and Scott, as of 
Goldsmith, Addison and Johnson. Lighter 
ballad poetry he had not lightness of ear to do 
justice to ; his sense of the strength and wis- 
dom of true meaning and of the force of 
rightly ordered syllables, made his delivery of 
Hamlet, Lear, Csesar or Marmion melodiously 
grand and just. . . . Thus I heard all the 
Shakespearean comedies and historical plays 
again and again — all Scott and 'Don Quixote,' 



RUSKIN, TEE PREACHER 243 

a favorite book of my father's and at which 
I could then laugh in ecstasy ; now it is one 
of the saddest, and in some things the most 
offensive of books." * 

For his own reading, in these childish days, 
Homer, in Pope's translation, and Walter 
Scott were his favorite authors ; but his 
mother compelled him to learn long chapters 
of the Bible by heart and " to read it every 
syllable through, hard names and all, from 
Genesis to the Apocalypse, about once a year," 
to which discipline he attributes his command 
of the resources of the English language, and 
whatever of vigor and beauty his style pos- 
sesses. It is somewhat puzzling, however, to 
find him, in his maturer years, citing the 1 19th 
Psalm as most precious to him of all the 
Scripture that he learned in his childhood. 

Another influence that told for much in the 
life of this child was the summer touring, for 
which his father's business gave the occasion. 
For two months every summer, with a coach 
and pair, Mr. Ruskin drove through England, 
visiting the gentry in their homes and taking 
orders for the supply of their wine-cellars. 
On these journeys, his wife and son were 

i Pralerita, i. 66. 



244 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

always his companions, " so that/' says John 
Buskin, " at a jog-trot pace, and through the 
panoramic opening of the four windows of a 
post-chaise, ... I saw all of the high roads 
and most of the cross-roads of England and 
Wales, and a great part of Lowland Scotland. 
... To my further benefit, as I grew older, 
I thus saw nearly all the noblemen's houses in 
England, in reverent and healthy delight of 
uncovetous admiration, perceiving, as soon as 
I could perceive any political truth at all, that 
it was probably much better to live in a small 
house and have Warwick Castle to be aston- 
ished at than to live in Warwick Castle and 
have nothing to be astonished at ; but that, 
at all events, it would not make Brunswick 
Square in the least more pleasantly habitable 
to pull Warwick Castle down. And, at this 
day, though I have kind invitations enough 
to visit America, I could not, even for a couple 
of months, live in a country so miserable as 
to possess no castles." 1 

All this abundance of out-of-door life was 
at least preparing the soil of this fertile mind 
for the fruit which it was yet to bear. Nor 
can we wonder that a boy as delicately or- 

i Prceterita, i. 5, 6. 



BUSKIN, THE PREACHER 245 

ganized as John Ruskin was, living in such 
an atmosphere of books, and feasted on the 
beauty of the sweetest landscapes that the sun 
ever shone on, should have begun early in 
life to make verses, and to exercise his pow- 
ers of expression in many ways. Before he 
was taught to write, he began to copy for his 
own pleasure the printed type, and the amount 
of literary production, in this form, with 
which he is credited in his seventh and eighth 
years, is notable. He gives us in " Prae- 
terita," in facsimile, some of the pages of the 
books which he was producing about that 
time, — manuscript books, which he made for 
himself, and neatly ruled, and in which he 
recorded in prose and verse his own amazing 
observations and reflections. Here, for ex- 
ample, is a bit of a poem of two hundred and 
twenty lines, composed when he was nine : — 

" Queen of flowers, O rose, 
From whose fair-colored leaves such odor flows, 
Thou must now be before thy subjects named 
Both for thy beauty and thy sweetness famed. 
Thou art the flower of England and the flower 
Of Beauty too, — of Venus' odorous bower, 
And thou wilt often shed sweet odors round, 
And often, sleeping, hide thy head on ground. 
And then the lily, towering up so proud, 
And raising its gay head among the various crowd, 



246 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

There the black spots upon a scarlet ground, 
And there the taper-pointed leaves are found." 

Conceive of a child of nine with all that 
sense of literary form ! And imagine a boy 
of the same age apostrophizing Mount Skid- 
daw, in words like these : — 

" Skiddaw, upon thy heights the sun shines bright, 
But only for a moment ; then gives place 
Unto a playful cloud, which on thy brow 
Sports wantonly, — then floats away in air, — 
Throwing its shadow on thy towering height, 
And, darkening for a moment thy green side, 
But adds unto its beauty, as it makes 
The sun more bright when it again appears. 
Then in the morning on thy brow these clouds 
Rest as upon a couch, and give vain scope 
For fancy's play. And airy fortresses 
And towers and battlements and all appear 
Chasing the others off, and in their turn 
Are chased off by the others." 

Frederic Harrison is not wrong in saying 
that " we might pick out of t The Excur- 
sion ' many a duller passage than this ; and 
it would not be easy to pick a single passage 
that would show the same precise and minute 
watching of the clouds on a mountain, as 
with the eye of a painter — the same pictorial 
distinctness." * 

Euskin, in " PraBterita," makes a careful 

1 John Ruskin, p. 21. 



BUSKIN, THE PREACHER 247 

inventory of the main blessings and the chief 
misfortunes of this childhood of his, and it is 
a notable exhibit. Naming the good things 
first, he says : " I had been taught the perfect 
meaning of peace in thought, act and word. 
I had never heard my father's or mother's 
voice once raised in any question with each 
other ; nor seen an angry or even slightly hurt 
or offended glance in the eye of either." 
"Next to the priceless gift of peace I had 
received the perfect understanding of the na- 
ture of obedience and faith. I obeyed word 
or lifted finger of father or mother as simply 
as a ship obeys her helm. . . . And my prac- 
tice in faith was soon complete ; nothing was 
ever promised me that was not given, nothing 
ever threatened me that was not inflicted, and 
nothing ever told me that was not true." To 
these he adds " the habit of fixed attention 
with both eyes and mind," and " an extreme 
perfection in palate and all other bodily 
sense " due to " the utter prohibition of cake, 
wine, comfits, or, except in carefullest prepa- 
ration, fruit." 

Now, per contra : " First, I had nothing to 
love. My parents were — in a sort — visible 
powers of nature to me, no more loved than 



248 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

sun or the moon ; only I should have been 
amazed and puzzled if either of them had 
gone out; (how much now, when both are 
darkened !). Still less did I love God ; not 
that I had any quarrel with him or fear 
of him ; but simply found what people told 
me was his service, disagreeable, and what 
people told me was his Book, not entertaining. 
I had no companion to quarrel with neither ; 
nobody to assist and nobody to thank. . . . 
Second, of calamities I had nothing to endure. 
Danger or pain of any kind I knew not ; my 
strength was never exercised, my patience 
never tried and my courage never forti- 
fied. . . . Thirdly I was taught no precision 
nor etiquette of manners ; it was enough if, 
in the little society that we saw, I remained 
unobtrusive, and replied to a question without 
shyness. . . . Lastly and chief of evils my 
judgment of right and wrong and powers of 
independent action were left entirely unde- 
veloped, because the bridle and the blinkers 
were never taken off me." 1 

It is a painful recital ; I wonder whether it is 
quite accurate. It was written at a time when 
Mr. Buskin's mind had been greatly disturbed, 
1 Prceterita, i. 42-46. 



BUSKIN, THE PREACHER 249 

and when his memory might have been clouded. 
I cannot think that love was wholly lacking in 
that home. Mr. Harrison, who was a frequent 
visitor in it, after Ruskin had come to man- 
hood, tells us that " the relations between John 
and his parents were amongst the most beau- 
tiful things that will live in (his) memory ; " 
and that " he invariably behaved toward them 
with the most affectionate deference." There 
could not have been such affection in the de- 
ference, if there had not been a real and a 
recognized affection in the authority to which 
the deference was yielded. The whole story 
shows that under their stern demeanor these 
parents were cherishing an absorbing devotion 
to their only son. Yet it is evident that the 
child, so utterly unlike them both, craved a 
kind of expression of this love which was be- 
yond their power. For the rest, Mr. Ruskin' s 
account of the parental discipline is undoubt- 
edly accurate, and I have dwelt on it because 
it is rare that a mind so wakeful and analytical 
as his remembers so minutely and reports so 
carefully the effects of parental discipline. 

Under competent tutors the lad was fitted 
for the university ; at the age of eighteen he 
became a gentleman commoner of Christ 



250 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

Church, Oxford, from which, six years later, 
he graduated. His parents had high hopes 
for him. " His ideal of my future," says Mr. 
Kuskin of his father, " now entirely formed in 
conviction of my genius, was that I should 
enter at college into the best society, take all 
the prizes the first year and a double first to 
finish with ; marry Clara V ere de V ere ; write 
poetry as good as Byron's, only pious ; preach 
sermons as good as Bossuet's, only Protestant ; 
be made at forty Bishop of Winchester, and 
at fifty Primate of England." 1 

It was not only his father's hope, it was also 
his mother's expectation. " She had, as she 
solemnly told me, devoted me to God before 
I was born, in imitation of Hannah. Yery 
good women," he comments, "are remark- 
ably apt to make away with their children 
prematurely after this manner." 2 The heart 
of this mother was perhaps reassured when 
this child, in his third year, on returning from 
church one Sunday, climbed into a chair and 
opened his mouth as follows : " People, be 
dood ! If you are dood, Dod will love you : if 
you are not dood, Dod will not love you. 
People, be dood ! " The first sermon was, 

1 Prceterita, i. 239. 2 Ibid. p. 15. 



BUSKIN, THE PREACHER 251 

nevertheless, ominous. It lacks the elements 
of sound doctrine. It puts too much stress 
on "mere morality." As he grew older this 
note was accentuated. A preacher he was 
likely to be — one of the greatest preachers 
of his century, but it became more and more 
clear to his own mind that he could not be a 
clergyman of the Church of England. His 
experience and that of Carlyle are parallel in 
this respect, though Ruskin never passed 
through such a struggle as Carlyle describes 
in " Sartor," and never, perhaps, far departed 
from the central beliefs of the Christian reli- 
gion. Not many years ago he wrote a series of 
letters on the Lord's Prayer, maintaining that 
the essentials of religious truth are contained 
in it, and urging that every minister ought to 
make sure that every phrase in it is rightly 
comprehended by his people. One who takes 
the Lord's Prayer for his standard of doctrine 
cannot be far astray from the Christian way. 
Mr. Ruskin's theology was not formulated ; 
like his political philosophy it was a curious 
mixture of radicalism and medisevalism ; but 
the essential Christian truths were not absent 
from it, and he preached them, all his life 
long, with mighty energy of conviction. 



252 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

His university course was interrupted by 
serious illness, due, it would seem, to the un- 
happy ending of his life's first romance. One 
of his father's partners in the wine business 
was a French gentleman, Mr. Peter Domecq, 
whose daughter Adele had visited at the Bus- 
kins', and John had fallen in love with her. 
The young lady in no wise reciprocated the 
affection ; it amused her ; she tried to laugh 
him out of it, but his ardor was fanned by her 
ridicule ; and when, in his third year in the 
university, he learned of the betrothal of 
Adele to a French gentleman, the disappoint- 
ment crushed him. There was serious pul- 
monary trouble; for a year and a half he 
was fighting for his life ; his parents devoted 
their whole time to him ; he was carried to 
the Kiviera, and sheltered and nursed until 
strength returned ; finally, in 1842, when he 
was twenty-three years old, he took his final 
examinations. 

These years had not been unproductive. 
He had been constantly writing for various 
periodicals, poetry chiefly ; he had won the 
Newdigate prize of the university for the 
best poem, and his ambitions appeared to take 
this direction ; but he was deeply interested in 



BUSKIN, THE PREACHER 253 

architecture and in painting, and among his 
contributions were appreciations and criticisms 
of various works of art. Before entering the 
university he had become a great admirer of 
the work of Turner, and while a student he 
took up the cudgels for him in some vigor- 
ous letters, signed Kata Phusin, the ideas 
of which were afterwards expanded into his 
"Modern Painters." Of the five volumes 
bearing this title the first was finished about 
the time of his graduation, in 1842, and was 
published anonymously the same year, when 
he was twenty-three; the last was not pub- 
lished until 1860. His " Seven Lamps of 
Architecture," " Stones of Venice," and other 
works appeared within or after these dates, 
and the eloquence and beauty of this critical 
and expository writing on the great themes 
of art won for him immediate and wide recog- 
nition. The opportunity thus gained was used 
faithfully for the elevation of men's ideals 
and the purification of their lives. From his 
particular judgments of men and their crea- 
tions many deductions must be made. He 
is sometimes rash, and sometimes prejudiced ; 
his generalizations are often sweeping ; but on 
the whole it was a good fight for reality, for 



254 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

sincerity and for spirituality in art, and the 
fruits of his victory are more precious, per- 
haps, than most of us in these days have 
known. "The law of Truth in Art/' says 
Mr. Harrison, " stands beside Carlyle's protest 
against c Shams.' That a building should 
look what it is, and be what it is built to 
serve, no one now dares dispute. That beauty 
itself comes second to truth, and must be 
sought in the architecture of Nature herself ; 
that the art of building reflects the life and 
manners, the passions and religion of those 
who build ; that in building we have to con- 
sider the hands by which it is wrought ; that 
art is not an end in itself, but the instru- 
ment wherein moral, intellectual, rational and 
social ideals are expressed ; — all this is now 
the alphabet of sound art." * It was not so, 
at the middle of the last century, when John 
Kuskin was writing his " Seven Lamps " and 
his " Stones of Venice." 

Whatsoever things are pure and lovely and 
true and honorable, these he sought to lift up 
into the sight and admiration of men. Art 
must express life, and the life which it ex- 
presses must be sound and true and beautiful. 

1 John Ruskin, p. 59. 



BUSKIN, THE PBEACHER 255 

We must know the things we are dealing 
with ; we must know the earth geologically ; 
we must study the clouds meteorologically ; 
we must know the plants and the trees and 
the birds as a naturalist knows them, and tell 
the truth about them ; this is the foundation 
of good art. Sometimes you will take him 
for a slavish realist, so sturdily does he stand 
up for truth in the representation of every- 
thing ; but if you do take him that way you 
will not understand him, for soon you will 
hear him saying that you must be careful 
about your selection, about your emphasis, 
always putting that where it belongs ; that 
if you tell all the truth you must tell it in 
such a way as to win the admiration of men 
for that which is highest. The great school 
of art, he says, " introduces in its conception 
of a subject, as much beauty as is possible 
consistently with truth. For instance, in any 
subject consisting of a number of figures, it 
will make as many of these figures beautiful 
as the faithful representation of humanity 
will admit. It will not deny the facts of 
ugliness or decrepitude, or relative inferiority 
or superiority of feature as necessarily mani- 
fested in a crowd, but it will, so far as it is in 



256 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

its power, seek for and dwell on the beauty 
that is in them, not on the ugliness." 1 

Great art, he insists, is the art which tends 
to greaten humanity ; to enlarge and ennoble 
the mind of the spectator, to quicken and 
invigorate all that is best in our nature. " I 
do not say," he adds, " that the art is great- 
est which gives most pleasure, because per- 
haps there is some art whose end is to teach 
and not to please. I do not say that the art 
is greatest which teaches us most, because 
perhaps there is some art whose end is to 
please and not to teach. I do not say that 
the art is greatest which imitates best, because 
perhaps there is some art whose end is to cre- 
ate and not to imitate. But I say that the 
art is greatest which conveys to the mind of 
the spectator by any means whatsoever, the 
greatest number of the greatest ideas; and 
I call an idea great in proportion as it is re- 
ceived by a higher faculty of the mind, and 
more fully occupies, and in occupying exer- 
cises and exalts the faculty by which it is 
received." 2 

The great painter, Ruskin maintains, must 

1 Modern Painters, iii. Part IV. ch. iii. § 12. 

2 Ibid. i. Part I. Sec. I. ch. ii. § 9. 



BUSKIN, THE PREACHER 257 

be master of himself, holding intense feeling 
in perfect command. It follows that " no 
vain or selfish person can possibly paint, in 
the noble sense of the word. Vanity and 
selfishness are troublous, eager, anxious, petu- 
lant ; painting can only be done in calm of 
mind." Equally true is it that " no shallow 
or petty person can paint. It is only per- 
fectness of mind, unity, depth, decision, the 
highest qualities, in fine, of the intellect, 
which will form the imagination." And 
lastly " no false person can paint. A person 
false at heart may, when it suits his purposes, 
seize a strong truth here or there ; but the 
relation of truth, its perfectness, that which 
makes it wholesome truth, he can never per- 
ceive. As wholeness and wholesomeness go 
together, so also sight with sincerity ; it is 
only the constant desire of and submission to 
truth which can measure its strange angles 
and mark its infinite aspects and fit them and 
knit them unto the strength of sacred inven- 
tion." l 

Something of that tendency to sweeping 
generalization of which I spoke here appears ; 
it is doubtful whether, historically, the rela- 
1 Modern Painters, v. Part VIII. ch. iv. § 21. 



258 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

tion between sound ethics and good art has 
always been as close as Ruskin insists. But 
the demands which he makes upon the artist 
are lofty and urgent ; our highest judgment 
consents that this is the kind of man he ought 
to be. Nothing is clearer than that Ruskin 
conceives of his function as not one whit less 
sacred than that of the prophet or the minister 
of God ; the beauty with which he is dealing 
is the outshining of divinity and he is to help 
the revelation, to be a witness for the light. 
Into all this art criticism no conception lower 
than this ever enters ; it is a trumpet call to 
all who devote their lives to any kind of art, 
summoning them to rise into newness and 
nobility of life, to cleanse themselves from 
selfishness and vanity and fit themselves to be 
first the beholders and then the heralds of the 
beauty of the Lord. The foundation of this 
art criticism is therefore in religion ; you are 
brought back continually to the eternal reali- 
ties which underlie all existence. 

And with what beauty of form is this truth 
arrayed ! Of all the men who have used the 
English language John Ruskin has given us 
the noblest prose. It would be rewarding, if 
there were time, to stop and compare him with 



BUSKIN, THE PREACHER 259 

such masters of style as Hooker, and Swift, 
and Jeremy Taylor, and Macaulay, and Thack- 
eray, and Matthew Arnold, and Hawthorne, 
and Lowell, and Stevenson, and Kipling, — 
all of whom have made us their debtors for 
prose that charms while it instructs ; but while 
I do not withhold from any of these the tribute 
of my admiration, I always come back to John 
Euskin as the writer who can say things more 
pithily, more keenly, more vividly, more lumi- 
nously, more beautifully, more magnificently 
than any one who ever wrote the English lan- 
guage. There may be those who think him 
too ornate ; you might say that of a sunset or 
of a New England forest in October. I wish 
I could spend the rest of this hour — perhaps 
I could not spend it more profitably — in re- 
peating to you strains of this noble eloquence, 
passages that I know almost by heart, but that 
I never read without quickened pulses. Many 
of them are familiar to you : those words of 
his about the clouds, and his exquisite descrip- 
tions of branches and leaves, of water-forms 
and snow-drifts. Take this one bit of tribute 
to the beauty of mountains : — 

" Consider, first, the difference produced in 
the whole tone of landscape color by the intro- 



260 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

duction of purple, violet, and deep ultra- 
marine blue which we owe to mountains. In 
an ordinary lowland landscape we have the 
blue of the sky ; the green of grass, which I 
will suppose (and this is an unnecessary con- 
cession to the lowlands) entirely fresh and 
bright ; the green of trees ; and certain ele- 
ments of purple, far more rich and beautiful 
than we generally should think in their bark 
and shadows ... as well as in ploughed 
fields and dark ground in general. But among 
mountains, in addition to all this, large un- 
broken spaces of pure violet and purple are 
introduced in these distances ; and even near, 
by films of clouds passing over the darkness 
of ravines or forests, blues are produced of 
the most subtle tenderness ; these azures and 
purples passing into rose-color of otherwise 
wholly unattainable delicacy among the upper 
summits, the blue of the sky being at the same 
time purer and deeper than in the plains. 
Nay, in some sense, a person who has never 
seen the rose-color of dawn crossing a blue 
mountain twelve or fifteen miles away can 
hardly be said to know what tenderness means 
at all. Bright tenderness he may, indeed, see 
in the sky or in a flower, but this grave tender- 



BUSKIN, THE PREACHER 261 

ness of the far-away hill-purples he cannot 
conceive." * 

With what power this comes home to one 
who loves the mountains and who can find 
time and chance to watch their symphonies of 
color in the radiant dawn and in the evening 
twilight. There is another passage which I 
find quoted by two recent biographers, Mrs. 
Meynell and Mr. Harrison, as illustrating the 
richness and splendor of Mr. Ruskin's style. 
It is the closing paragraph of the chapter on 
Lamp of Sacrifice, in the " Seven Lamps," 
and, happily for our purpose, deals with orna- 
ment in structural art : — 

" It is one of the affectations of architects 
to speak of overcharged ornament. Orna- 
ment cannot be overcharged if it is good, and 
it is always overcharged if it is bad. ... It 
is not less the boast of some styles that they 
can bear ornament than of others that they 
can do without it ; but we do not often enough 
reflect that those very styles of so haughty 
simplicity, owe part of their pleasantness to 
contrast and would be wearisome if universal. 
They are but the rests and monotones of the 
art ; it is to its far happier, far higher exalta- 

1 Modern Painters, iv. Part V. ch. xx. § 4. 



262 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

tions that we owe those fair fronts of varie- 
gated mosaic, charged with wild fancies and 
dark hosts of imagery thicker and quainter than 
ever filled the depth of midsummer dream ; 
those vaulted gates, trellised with close leaves ; 
those window labyrinths of twisted tracery 
and starry light ; those misty masses of mul- 
titudinous pinnacle and diademed tower ; the 
only witnesses that remain to us, perhaps, of 
the faith and fear of nations. All else for 
which the builders sacrificed has passed away 

— all their living interests, and aims, and 
achievements. We know not for what they 
labored, and we see no evidence of their re- 
ward. Victory, wealth, authority, happiness 

— all have departed, though bought by many 
a bitter sacrifice. But of them, and their toil 
upon the earth, one reward, one evidence is 
left us in those gray heaps of deep-wrought 
stone. They have taken with them to the 
grave their powers, their honors, and their er- 
rors ; but they have left us their adoration." 

Mrs. Meynell well says that " this splendid 
passage is itself a Gothic architecture of 
style," and Mr. Harrison declares that " no 
man of feeling who has in him the echoes of 
this funeral sermon can stand before a great 



BUSKIN, TEE PEEACHER 263 

mediaeval cathedral without being conscious 
that it has gained for him a new meaning, a 
sublimer pathos." Such beauty of literary 
form as Ruskin cultivated is not affected now- 
adays ; yet I cannot doubt that we shall see 
a reaction from the stark simplicity of ma- 
chine-made English, and that the color and 
the music of Ruskin's prose will be more 
highly valued in days not distant. 

It was not, however, in these studies of 
nature and art that John Ruskin's most 
eloquent work was done, but rather in the 
prophetic teachings of the latter half of his 
life. For Mr. Ruskin's life divides itself into 
two almost exactly equal parts. Up to his for- 
tieth year his main interest was in art ; from 
his fortieth to his eightieth year his chief 
thought was given to man in his social rela- 
tions. This division is by no means exclu- 
sive, for while he was studying art his eye 
was always upon the people to whom that art 
ought to furnish an uplifting ministry ; " art 
for art's sake " he knew nothing about ; art 
for humanity's sake was the object of his de- 
votion. " All art," he said, " which involves 
no reference to man is false or nugatory. 
And all art which involves misconception of 



264 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

man, or base thought of him, is in that de- 
gree false and base." What brought about 
the change in the prevailing strain of his in- 
tellectual effort was the slowly gathering con- 
viction that before great art could be domes- 
ticated among us, society must be regenerated ; 
we must have better men. In the very same 
year when Wagner, for his love of art, was 
becoming a revolutionary, Ruskin, under the 
same impulse, was girding his loins for that ef- 
fort after social amelioration to which the last 
half of his life was almost exclusively given. 
" With your hopes for the elevation of English 
art by means of frescoes [so he wrote so far 
back as 1843] I cannot sympathize. ... It 
is not the material nor the space that can give 
us thoughts, passions, nor power. I see on 
our academy walls nothing but what is ignoble 
in small pictures and would be disgusting in 
great ones. It is not the love of fresco that 
we want ; but it is the love of God and his 
creatures ; it is humility and charity and self- 
denial and fasting and prayer ; it is a total 
change of character." " So early," says Mr. 
Collingwood, " he had taken up and wrapped 
around him the mantle of Cassandra." * 

1 Life and Work of John Ruskin, i. 146. 



BUSKIN, THE PREACHER 265 

What Mr. Ruskin thought he saw in the 
economic movements round about him was a 
tendency to dehumanize men. Ten years later 
than the letter from which I have quoted, in 
" The Stones of Venice/' he arraigned the 
modern system of industry for this tendency, 
in words as trenchant as any he has ever writ- 
ten. Indeed the germ of all his teaching as 
a social reformer is found in that chapter on 
The Nature of Gothic. Hear him : — 

"We have studied and much perfected of 
late the great civilized invention of the divi- 
sion of labor, only we give it a false name. 
It is not, truly speaking, the labor that is di- 
vided but the man. Divided into mere seg- 
ments of men ; broken into small fragments 
and crumbs of life ; so that all the little piece 
of intelligence that is left in a man is not 
enough to make a pin or a nail, but exhausts it- 
self in making the point of a pin or the head 
of a nail. Now it is a good and desirable thing, 
truly, to make many pins in a day ; but if we 
could only see with what crystal sand their 
points were polished — sand of human soul, 
much to be magnified before it could be dis- 
cerned for what it is — we should think there 
might be some loss in it also. And the great 



266 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, 
louder than their furnace blast, is all in very 
deed for this, — that we manufacture every- 
thing there except men ; we blanch cotton, and 
strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape 
pottery, but to brighten, to strengthen, to re- 
fine or to form a single living spirit never 
enters into our estimation of advantages. 
And all the evil to which that cry is urging 
our myriads can be met in only one way ; not 
by teaching nor preaching, for to teach them 
is but to show them their misery, and to 
preach to them, if we do nothing more than 
preach, is to mock at it. It can be met only 
by a right understanding on the part of all 
classes of what kinds of labor are good for 
men, raising them and making them happy ; 
by a determined sacrifice of such convenience 
or beauty or cheapness as is to be got only 
by the degradation of the workman ; and by 
equally determined demand for the products 
and results of healthy and ennobling labor." * 
The first volume in which Mr. Ruskin set 
forth his social theories was " The Political 
Economy of Art," lectures delivered in Man- 
chester in 1857, full of keen analysis and 

i Stones of Venice, ii. vi. § 16. 



BUSKIN, THE PBEACHEB 267 

pnngent eloquence ; after this came " Unto 
this Last," begun as essays in the " Cornhill 
Magazine " in I860, and published as a book 
two years later ; " Munera Pulveris," which 
f oUowed in 1863 ; " The Crown of Wild 
Olive," in 1866 ; " Time and Tide/' in 1867 ; 
and " Fors Clavigera," which was published 
serially, at irregular intervals, between 1871 
and 1884. The violent intolerance with which 
the earlier of these writings were received is 
now almost incredible. Thackeray was the 
editor of " Cornhill," and the publishers of 
the Magazine, alarmed at the outcry against 
Ruskin's essays, compelled the editor to sus- 
pend their publication after four numbers had 
appeared. Froude, a little later, started a new 
series, in " Fraser's Magazine," but he, too, 
was forced to shut Ruskin out after the fourth 
number. Bigotry is not the monopoly of the 
religionists. There could be no more conclu- 
sive proof that such doctrine was needed than 
is seen in this angry determination to sup- 
press it. Something is rotten in any alleged 
science which will not tolerate the free dis- 
cussion of its fundamental principles. Some- 
thing was rotten in the economic science of 
that time, and Mr. Ruskin's probe laid it open. 



268 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

Needless to say his criticism was not always 
unerring. Here and there it went wildly 
astray. The orthodox economists could read- 
ily make this appear, and when they had ex- 
posed some glaring error in his analysis, it 
was easy to apply the cowardly and contempt- 
ible maxim, ab uno disce omnia. To judge 
an argument by its flaws is the sophist's best 
resource. 

It would be perilous for uninstructed read- 
ers to accept Mr. Kuskin as a final authority 
in economic science. Not a few have done 
so, to their own detriment. His attack upon 
profit as essentially vicious, and upon interest 
as morally unjustifiable, are instances of his 
imperfect reasoning. He seems to assert that 
there can be no mutual gain in exchange ; 
that what one party gains the other must 
necessarily lose. It is true that he admits an 
" advantage," but refuses to call it profit, 
maintaining that in the transaction " nothing 
is constructed or produced.' ' Mr. Hobson's 
criticism is decisive. " The orthodox econo- 
mist's first comment is that something is pro- 
duced by exchange, viz., utility ; for things in 
the possession of those who need them are 
more useful than in the hands of those who 



RUSKIN, THE PREACHER 269 

need them less." That the method of com- 
petitive bargaining is often employed by the 
strong to despoil the weak is undoubtedly true, 
but that it is necessarily iniquitous is not true. 
The same defective analysis appears in his 
denunciations of interest. His argument rests 
on the assumption that " money does not 
grow ; " it ignores the fact that money gives 
command of land and of capital which are pro- 
ductive. The prohibitions of interest in the 
Bible and by the ancient church refer to a 
wholly different state of society and to dif- 
ferent forms of lending than those with which 
we are f amiliar. Much may be said in support 
of the ethical proposition that when a poor 
man is obliged to borrow money from a rich 
man to live upon, the rich man ought not to 
charge him interest ; that was the kind of bor- 
rowing to which the Scriptural prohibitions 
referred. But when the money of the poor 
man — in the savings bank, for example — 
is loaned to the rich man to do business with, 
to employ in productive industries, there is 
good reason why the borrower should pay in- 
terest to the lender. 

But while these and other of Mr. Ruskin's 
contentions have been shown to be invalid, 



270 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

his attack upon the positions which the lead- 
ing economists were occupying forty years 
ago has been successful to a very remarkable 
extent. The justification of this statement 
may be shown by asking, with Mr. Hobson, 
" what has now become of the maxims, ' In- 
dustry is limited by capital/ i Labor receives 
advances from a wage-fund/ c A demand for 
commodities is not a demand for labor/ c Value 
depends on cost of production/ ' Rent of land 
stands by itself as a surplus, not paid out of 
the product of labor, and forming no element 
in price/ Is there any one of these central 
dogmas of the political economy of 1860, 
which commands the general allegiance of 
modern teachers of commercial science ? Sev- 
eral of them, notably the wage-fund doctrine, 
and the cost theory of value, may be said to 
have almost disappeared, while the others, so 
far as they survive, present a strangely battered 
or transformed appearance. Now, though 
academic reformers of industrial science give 
small attention and less credit to John Euskin, 
it is none the less true that his criticism in 
1 Unto this Last/ ' Munera Pulveris/ and 
' Fors Clavigera ' furnishes, in several im- 
portant instances, the first clear and effective 



BUSKIN, THE PBEACHEE 271 

refutation of the mortal errors of the above- 
named doctrines." 1 

The central contention of Ruskin was that 
political economy, divorced from considera- 
tions of human welfare, is a pseudo-science ; 
that economic questions cannot be understood 
apart from ethical and social questions ; that 
the attempt to divorce them results not only 
in hard-hearted immorality of conduct, but in 
a glaringly incomplete induction of facts. 
The facts, he maintained, which are inexpli- 
cably involved in all production and distribu- 
tion of economic goods are largely moral 
facts, having immediate relation to human 
character ; to leave them out is to vitiate all 
your reasoning. His main thesis, perhaps, is 
in the words : " There is no icealth but life, 
— life, including all its powers of love, of 
joy, and of admiration. That country is the 
richest which nourishes the greatest number 
of noble and happy human beings. That 
man is the richest who, having perfected the 
functions of his own life to the utmost, has 
also the widest influence, both personal and 
by means of his possessions, over the lives of 
others. A strange political economy ; " — so 

1 John Ruskin, Social Reformer, p. 125. 



272 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

its author himself muses — " the only one, 
nevertheless, that ever was or can be ; all po- 
litical economy founded on self-interest being 
but the fulfillment of that which once brought 
schism into the policy of angels, and ruin 
into the economy of heaven." 1 

This conception is steadily held and stur- 
dily vindicated in all these books. " The real 
science of political economy," he urges, " is 
that which teaches nations to desire and labor 
for the things that lead to life." " Value " 
is that which avails for life, the life that is 
life indeed. Therefore the motive which the 
old political economy isolates and makes the 
centre of all its reasonings is not the central 
motive in any true economy. It is not the 
main business of any healthy human life to 
make money. A good soldier likes his pay, 
he tells the workingmen, but does not fight 
for money ; a good clergyman does not work 
mainly for his fees, nor a good doctor. " And 
so with all other brave and highly trained 
men ; their work is first, their fee second — 
very important always, but still second. But 
in every nation, as I said, there is a vast class 
who are ill-educated, cowardly, and more or 

1 Unto this Last, Popular Edition, p. 126. 



BUSKIN, THE PREACHER 273 

less stupid. And with these people, just as 
certainly, the fee is first and the work second, 
as with brave people the work is first and the 
fee second. And this is no small distinc- 
tion. It is the whole distinction in a man ; 
distinction between life and death in him ; 
between heaven and hell for him. You can- 
not serve two masters. You must serve one 
or the other. If your work is first with you 
and your fee second, work is your master, and 
the Lord of work, who is God. But if your 
fee is first and your work second, fee is your 
master, and the Lord of fee, who is the Devil, 
and not only the Devil, but the lowest of devils, 
— ' the least erected fiend that fell.' So there 
you have it in brief terms : Work first, you are 
God's servants ; fee first, you are the fiend's. 
And it makes a difference, now and ever, be- 
lieve me, whether you serve Him who has 
on his vesture and thigh written ' King of 
Kings,' and whose service is perfect freedom ; 
or him on whose vesture and thigh the name 
is written, 6 Slave of Slaves,' and whose ser- 
vice is perfect slavery." * 

These words illustrate Mr. Ruskin's power 
of putting plain truths pungently ; and they 

1 The Crown of Wild Olive, Popular Edition, p. 19. 



274 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

also bear witness to the fidelity with which he 
preached his gospel to all sorts and conditions 
of men. No great teacher ever indulged less 
in flattery ; the listening audience was sure to 
hear many things which were more wholesome 
than palatable. " Fors Clavigera " is full of 
the most merciless rebukes of the narrowness 
and ignorance of the workingmen ; yet theirs 
was the cause for which he gave life and for- 
tune. 

It would be natural to infer that a philoso- 
pher who assailed so trenchantly the old econ- 
omy and who denounced so unsparingly the 
existing competitive system would turn out 
to be a Socialist. Mr. Ruskin was, indeed, 
a Socialist to this extent, that he demanded a 
greatly increased control of industry by the 
State, and that he maintained the right to 
labor and the obligation of the State to see 
to it that every man has the opportunity of 
earning his living by his labor. But his theory 
of society differed very widely from that of 
the Socialists. He insisted that every man 
ought to own his own house, — ought to build 
it for himself, indeed ; and his social scheme 
involved the restoration of the old system of 
guilds, with the return of something like 



BUSKIN, THE PEEACHER 275 

feudalism. Democracy he did not believe in 
at all ; he insisted that there were essential 
and everlasting differences among men, and 
that society must be adjusted to this fact. It 
is doubtful whether he ever understood the 
essential features of democracy ; and it is 
clear to my own mind that much of his poli- 
tical teaching is inconsistent with his own 
deepest ethical convictions. Mr. Ruskin, as I 
have already said, is far from being a consist- 
ent thinker ; you cannot follow him blindly. 
He will not let you follow him in that way. 
He gives you constant warnings of his fal- 
libility. But even when you are constrained 
to traverse his logic, he rouses and warms you ; 
you get much more good out of his errors than 
out of some men's accuracies. 

The most notable enterprise of his life was 
his organization of the St. George's Guild, 
which was set on foot in the early seventies. 
What he chiefly desired was to withdraw the 
people from the great industrial towns and to 
teach them to live a simpler and healthier life 
in the country. He proposed, therefore, a 
fund for the purchase of agricultural land 
which should be cultivated by manual labor, 
with no steam machinery and as little as pos- 



276 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

sible driven by water power, — all the labor- 
ers to be paid fixed and sufficient wages, to 
live in cottages of their own, their children to 
be educated along the lines indicated by him ; 
manual training of the most primitive sort be- 
ing central in the regimen, and outdoor sport 
of all varieties to be encouraged. Later he 
provided for the addition of an artisan class, 
so that the colony should be, if possible, self- 
maintaining. Gradually the social scheme 
expanded in his mind until there was quite a 
hierarchy of masters and marshals and land- 
lords whose rank was fixed and whose duty it 
was to guide and control the companies of 
tenants and tradesmen and laborers. " Fors 
Clavigera " expounds and justifies this ro- 
mantic scheme, often in passages of sinewy elo- 
quence ; and to show how serious a business 
it was, a most solemn declaration of faith was 
prepared, which every companion of the Guild 
was required to sign. Nothing better illus- 
trates Mr. Buskin's social theories than this 
confession and covenant : — 

" I trust in the living God, Father Al- 
mighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and 
of all things and creatures, visible and in- 
visible. 



BUSKIN, THE PREACHER 277 

" I trust in the kindness of His law and the 
goodness of His work. 

" And I will strive to love Him and keep 
His law and do His work while I live. 

" I trust in the nobleness of human nature, 
in the majesty of its faculties, the fullness of 
its mercy, the joy of its love. 

" And I will strive to love my neighbor as 
myself, and even when I cannot will act as if 
I did. 

" I will labor, with such strength and op- 
portunity as God gives me, for my own daily 
bread ; and all that my hands find to do I will 
do with all my might. 

" I will not deceive nor cause to be deceived 
any human being for my gain or pleasure, 
nor hurt, or cause to be hurt any human be- 
ing for my gain or pleasure, nor rob, nor cause 
to be robbed any human being for my gain or 
pleasure. 

" I will not kill or hurt any living creature 
needlessly, nor destroy any beautiful thing; 
but will strive to save and comfort all gentle 
life and guard and perfect all natural beauty 
upon the earth. 

" I will strive to raise my own body and soul 
daily into all the higher powers of duty and 



278 WITNESSES OF TEE LIGHT 

happiness, not in rivalry or contention with 
others, but for the help, delight and honor of 
others, and for the joy and peace of my own 
life." * 

Two other articles pledge the candidate 
faithfully to obey the laws of his country and 
the laws of his Guild. Is it not a noble hymn 
of faith and hope and love ? If society could 
be organized, even in installments, on such 
a foundation, the millennium would be in 
sight. But, sad to say, the blessed day refused 
to dawn. Mr. Kuskin was ready with his 
own funds to put the scheme in operation ; 
$50,000 was offered as a beginning and he 
called for volunteers who would give each a 
tenth of his estate to furnish the necessary 
capital, but the responses were few and faint. 
After a year or two of waiting the directors 
named by him acquired land in two or three 
places, and there was much consultation at 
one time with a little group of communists at 
Sheffield, who nibbled at the bait, but refused, 
when the pinch came, to go upon the land ; 
they were doing very well as wage-workers in 
Sheffield and did not, after all, wish to sepa- 
rate themselves from the industrial system on 

1 Fors Clavigera, Letter lviii. 



BUSKIN, THE PREACHER 279 

which they were waging war. So far as I can 
learn the plan came utterly to naught. It 
did not even reach the experimental stage. 
The Guild of St. George, about which in 
" Fors Clavigera " so many eloquent words 
were written, never materialized. One reason 
for the failure may have been the dangerous 
illness of Mr. Ruskin, from brain fever, about 
the time that the plans of work were maturing, 
— an illness from which he never fully re- 
covered. His personal care might have saved 
the Guild from utter collapse. Still, all that 
we can say of it is, that it was a costly, perhaps 
a somewhat quixotic, attempt to realize his 
social ideals — ideals which involve a reversion 
to social forms that can never again be per- 
manently reestablished on the earth. 

I have but dimly sketched the life of John 
Ruskin ; I have failed to mention many im- 
portant events and interests ; I have not even 
spoken of his work as professor of the History 
of Art in Oxford, into which he threw him- 
self for many years with great enthusiasm ; 
nor of his connection with the Workingmen's 
College in London, in which he did much 
gratuitous teaching, devoting his great talents 
to the task of instructing young mechanics in 



280 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

the most elementary principles of art. Nor 
have I alluded to his production as an artist, 
which is by no means to be despised ; many of 
his drawings, especially those of an architec- 
tural character, are wonderfully delicate and 
spirited. I have not spoken of the bitter dis- 
appointments and sorrows of his domestic life, 
in all of which he bore himself as a true and 
stainless gentleman. 

We often say that a writer must be judged 
by his works ; yet this judgment would prob- 
ably be unfair to John Ruskin. We should in- 
deed, with no misgiving, pronounce him a pure 
and chivalrous soul, a man of high courage, of 
unflinching truth, of unswerving devotion to 
loftiest ideals. But we should also be inclined 
to describe him as passionate and rude and 
brusque, — a man of unamiable and turbulent 
temper. In this we should do him injustice. 
Those who knew him best bear witness that 
the fierceness and severity which often find 
utterance in his books were absent from his 
personality. Mr. Harrison, who knew him well, 
says : " He was the very mirror of courtesy 
with an indescribable charm of spontaneous 
lovingness. . . . No boy could blurt out all 
that he enjoyed and wanted with more artless 



RUSKIN, THE PREACHER 281 

freedom ; no girl could be more humble, mod- 
est and unassuming. . . . The world must 
judge his writings as they stand. I can only 
say that, in personal intercourse, I have never 
known him, in full health, betrayed into a 
harsh word or an ungracious phrase, or an un- 
kind judgment, or a trace of egotism. . . . 
It remains a psychological puzzle how one who 
could write with passion and scorn such as 
Carlyle and Byron never reached, who in print 
was so often Athanasius contra mwidum, was 
in private life one of the gentlest, best, hum- 
blest of men." * 

Mr. Ruskin inherited a fortune, something 
like a million dollars, and it was all ex- 
pended, mainly in efforts to benefit his fellow- 
men. He endowed various professorships of 
art ; he built for the common people in Shef- 
field, a museum which bears his name. Be- 
sides the large sums which were devoted to 
the Guild of St. George he did much to revive 
such small industries as hand weaving, wood 
carving, and various handicrafts. As the 
world measures success, he was not a success- 
ful man. And there have been many, in re- 
cent years, by whom his contribution to social 

1 John Ruskin, pp. 93-95. 



282 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

science has been greatly disparaged. It needs 
sifting, as we have seen ; but there is precious 
grain after the sifting, of which there shall 
be, in the generations following, bread of life 
for the nations. Mr. Harrison's inventory of 
what abides in Ruskin's social teaching is a 
legacy which most of us might be content to 
leave : — 

"The pedantic, pseudo-scientific Plutol- 
ogy, or science of wealth, which he de- 
manded, is as dead as alchemy or phlogiston. 
His notion that economic prosperity is sub- 
ordinate to the well-being of the people is the 
axiom of politicians as of philosophers. His 
idea that the wise use of wealth, the distribu- 
tion of products, the health and happiness 
of the producers, come before the accumu- 
lation of wealth is a commonplace, not of 
philanthropists but of statesmen and journal- 
ists. His appeal for organization of indus- 
try, the suppression of public nuisances and 
restriction of anti-social abuses, is a truism 
to the reformers of to-day. . . . Read all he 
says as to the necessity of training schools, 
technical schools, state supervision of prac- 
tical and physical education, help to the un- 
employed, provision for the aged, the recovery 



BUSKIN, TEE PREACHER 283 

of waste lands, the qualified ownership of the 
soil, . . . read all these glancings of a pure 
soul from heaven to earth on a multitude of 
things social and humane, and you will recog- 
nize how truly John Ruskin forty years ago 
was a pioneer of the things which to-day the 
best spirits of our time so earnestly yearn to 
see. He is forgotten now because he went 
forth into a sort of moral wilderness and 
cried, c Repent and reform, for the kingdom 
of heaven is at hand.' The kingdom of hea- 
ven is not yet come on us, perhaps is yet far 
off ; but John was the forerunner of that 
which will one day come to pass. He was 
not, as the mocking crowd said, ' a reed shaken 
with the wind.' " 1 

It was a long twilight, in which he rested 
from his labors on the shores of Coniston 
Water ; the care of some who were dear and 
faithful comforted him in his declining days. 
For the last two years he was slowly passing 
under the shadow; the tablets of memory 
were blurred and imagination had folded her 
wings ; the old man was an infant of days. 
It was mournful that one who had waited so 
long at the gates of the day should be left for 

i John Ruskin, pp. 107, 108. 



284 WITNESSES OF THE LIGHT 

so many months in the darkness ; all who loved 
him gave thanks when the veil was parted 
and the free spirit rose into the unfading 
light. They carried his body to the grave by 
the beautiful Coniston Water; hidden in 
blossoms was the bier on which they bore 
him ; a wreath from the queen crowned the 
floral offering. Men and women from all 
parts of England were gathered about that 
grave ; if the ocean were not so wide there 
would have been a far greater throng. At the 
same hour, in the great Abbey at Westmin- 
ster, where burial had been offered him, ser- 
vices were held in his memory. 

Where he is we do not know ; but in any 
world where the glory of God is revealed 
he may be confidently looked for ; to discern 
that glory and to open the eyes of men to 
behold it has been his chief end through all 
his days upon the earth. No man ever loved 
the mountains better, or the evening light 
upon their summits, or the clouds that kissed 
and crowned them, or the forests that draped 
their sides ; and if, as I love to dream, the 
world to which he has gone is not unlike 
the world from which he has passed, then I 
can almost imagine that at the advent of 



BUSKIN, THE PBEACHEB 285 

one who loves them so the mountains and 
the hills of that country broke forth be- 
fore him into singing and all the trees of the 
field clapped their hands. 



Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton & Co. 
Cambridge, Mass., U.S. A. 



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